prendre le dessus
\pʁɑ̃dʁ lə də.sy\
The verdict
“prendre le dessus” 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
- 17
- letters
According to Wiktionary data (CC BY-SA, analyzed May 6, 2026) - Commencer à se rétablir dans sa santé, dans son moral, en parlant d’une personne.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | prendre le dessus |
| Language | French |
| Part of speech | Verb |
| IPA | \pʁɑ̃dʁ lə də.sy\ |
| Letters | 17 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 0 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Where “prendre le dessus” sits in French frequency
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The French entry for prendre le dessus is 17 letters long, classified as a verb, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as \pʁɑ̃dʁ lə də.sy\. It sits outside the most-frequent rank tiers, which is often why uncommon words generate more spelling variants per reader. Wiktionary records 3 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.
No misspelling variants are generated for prendre le dessus 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 prendre le dessus, spelled P-R-E-N-D-R-E- -L-E- -D-E-S-S-U-S, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.
Definition
- 1Commencer à se rétablir dans sa santé, dans son moral, en parlant d’une personne.
- 2Commencer à s'imposer à ses adversaires dans une compétition, un combat.
- 3S'imposer.
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.
Cite this page
Free to reuse with attribution (CC BY-SA). Copy the citation:
PlainSpell, “prendre le dessus, French word data” (May 6, 2026). Derived from Wiktionary (kaikki.org, CC BY-SA) and an open word-frequency list. https://plainspell.com/fr/mot/prendre-le-dessus
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Using “prendre le dessus”
The practical upshot for anyone who landed here from a spell-check.
- The one correct French spelling is P-R-E-N-D-R-E- -L-E- -D-E-S-S-U-S - every other letter order is a misspelling in standard orthography.
- Say it as \pʁɑ̃dʁ lə də.sy\ (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: