porte-à-faux
\pɔʁ.t‿a.fo\
The verdict
“porte-à-faux” is uncommon French (outside the top frequency list), classed as a noun. The kind of spelling people second-guess.
- Unranked
- below top-frequency French
- 12
- letters
According to Wiktionary data (CC BY-SA, analyzed September 3, 2026) - Impression d'instabilité ou manque de stabilité due à l’absence de soutien.
Corpus desk
Index FR-porte-a-faux · porte-à-faux · French
porte-à-faux · unranked · 0 variants · 0 confusables
- FREQ-UNRANKED Unranked
- LEN-MEGA 12 letters
- VOW-5 5 vowels
- CONFUS-0 No pairs
- VAR-0 0 variants
- BOOK-THIN "P" thin
- PHOTO-UNK Peer pending
Desk codes from Wiktionary headword shape, FrequencyWords rank tier, confusable-pair count, generated misspelling depth, letter-cohort book size, and photo-finish peer. Not a difficulty grade.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | porte-à-faux |
| Language | French |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| IPA | \pɔʁ.t‿a.fo\ |
| Letters | 12 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 0 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Longue queue: rang de « porte-à-faux » en français
Rare enough to double-check
porte-à-faux is uncommon French outside the top frequency list, classed as anoun, transcribed \pɔʁ.t‿a.fo\. Rarity is why readers land here mid-draft. 3 senses are on record.
The misspelling generator found no plausible variants for porte-à-faux, since its letter sequence doesn't invite the usual edit-distance slips. No close-neighbour confusable shows up for this headword in our dataset, since nothing in our dataset looks or sounds close enough to cause mix-ups.
Wiktionary doesn't record an etymology for this headword, leaving phoneme-to-grapheme mapping as the best guide to its spelling rather than a borrowing history. The correct French form is porte-à-faux, spelled P-O-R-T-E---À---F-A-U-X.
Definition
- 1Impression d'instabilité ou manque de stabilité due à l’absence de soutien.
- 2Structure qui s’élance dans le vide en ne reposant que sur un point d’appui.
- 3Distance entre l’extrémité avant (ou arrière) d'un véhicule sur roues (ou d’un attelage sur roues) et la position de son essieu le plus proche.
Recorded use
Wiktionary examplesThese source excerpts show how porte-à-faux appears in context. They illustrate usage; the definition above remains the entry’s reference meaning.
Il semble que ce soit un porte-à-faux qui ait rendu cette construction instable.
Ce mur est hors d’aplomb, il est en porte-à-faux.
Synonyms
This word in other languages
Definitions, pronunciation, and etymology for this entry are drawn from Wiktionary via the kaikki.org structured extract (CC BY-SA). See the methodology for how each field is sourced and updated.