perdre la face
The verdict
“perdre la face” is outside the top-ranked French vocabulary, used as a verb — the kind of word writers most often double-check.
- Unranked
- below top-frequency French
- 14
- letters
Dominant Wiktionary sense: Se trouver dans une situation humiliante où son ignorance ou sa faiblesse est exposée ; être atteint par une attaque visant l’humiliation.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | perdre la face |
| Language | French |
| Part of speech | Verb |
| IPA | \pɛʁ.dʁə la fas\ |
| Letters | 14 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 0 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Where “perdre la face” sits in French frequency
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The French entry for perdre la face is 14 letters long, classified as a verb, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as \pɛʁ.dʁə la fas\. It sits outside the most-frequent rank tiers, which is often why uncommon words generate more spelling variants per reader. The dominant gloss from Wiktionary reads: "Se trouver dans une situation humiliante où son ignorance ou sa faiblesse est exposée ; être atteint par une attaque visant l’humiliation.".
No misspelling variants are generated for perdre la face in our index, suggesting the orthography follows predictable French patterns. It is not paired with a close-neighbour confusable in our dataset, which tends to mean the word is visually distinctive enough to stand on its own.
No explicit etymology string is stored for this entry, so spelling patterns must be inferred from the word's phoneme-to-grapheme mapping rather than from a documented borrowing chain. For readers arriving here from a spelling check, the authoritative guidance is: the correct French form is perdre la face, spelled P-E-R-D-R-E- -L-A- -F-A-C-E, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.
Definition
- 1Se trouver dans une situation humiliante où son ignorance ou sa faiblesse est exposée ; être atteint par une attaque visant l’humiliation.
This word in other languages
Frequently Asked Questions
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Using “perdre la face”
The practical upshot for anyone who landed here from a spell-check.
- The one correct French spelling is P-E-R-D-R-E- -L-A- -F-A-C-E — every other letter order is a misspelling in standard orthography.
- Say it as \pɛʁ.dʁə la fas\ (IPA); tap the speaker on the pronunciation badge to hear it where audio exists.
- Browse more French words and confusable pairs in the same reference. French words
Nearby French words
Other entries that begin with the letter P in our French index: