poule mouillée
\pul mu.je\
The verdict
“poule mouillée” is uncommon French (outside the top frequency list), classed as a noun. The kind of spelling people second-guess.
- Unranked
- below top-frequency French
- 14
- letters
According to Wiktionary data (CC BY-SA, analyzed September 3, 2026) - Personne qui manque de courage et de résolution.
Corpus desk
Index FR-poule-mouillee · poule mouillée · French
poule mouillée · unranked · 0 variants · 0 confusables
- FREQ-UNRANKED Unranked
- LEN-MEGA 14 letters
- VOW-8 8 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 | poule mouillée |
| Language | French |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| IPA | \pul mu.je\ |
| Letters | 14 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 0 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Longue queue: rang de « poule mouillée » en français
Rare enough to double-check
poule mouillée is uncommon French outside the top frequency list, classed as anoun, transcribed \pul mu.je\. Rarity is why readers land here mid-draft. Gloss: "Personne qui manque de courage et de résolution.".
No generated misspelling entries exist for poule mouillée in our index, and the word's spelling is regular enough that our generator found nothing worth flagging. No close-neighbour confusable shows up for this headword in our dataset, a sign it's visually distinctive enough not to be mixed up with another word.
No documented word history exists 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 poule mouillée, spelled P-O-U-L-E- -M-O-U-I-L-L-É-E.
Definition
- 1Personne qui manque de courage et de résolution.
Recorded use
Wiktionary examplesThese source excerpts show how poule mouillée appears in context. They illustrate usage; the definition above remains the entry’s reference meaning.
— Voici déjà plus de deux heures que je suis levé. — Levé !... Tu t’es donc couché ? poule mouillée !
Il faut bien reconnaître aussi que la victoire de 1871 n’a pas peu contribué à donner aux Allemands de toute classe un sentiment de confiance en leurs forces qu’on ne trouve pas au même degré chez nous à l’heure actuelle : que l’on compare, par exemple, le parti catholique allemand aux poules mouillées qui forment en France la clientèle de l’Église ! Nos…
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.