quand le sage montre la Lune, l’idiot regarde le doigt
The verdict
“quand le sage montre la Lune, l’idiot regarde le doigt” is outside the top-ranked French vocabulary, used as a phrase — the kind of word writers most often double-check.
- Unranked
- below top-frequency French
- 54
- letters
Dominant Wiktionary sense: Certaines personnes peu réfléchies n’arrivent pas à voir ce qui est pertinent.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | quand le sage montre la Lune, l’idiot regarde le doigt |
| Language | French |
| Part of speech | Phrase |
| IPA | \kɑ̃ lə saʒ mɔ̃.tʁə la lyn l‿i.djo ʁə.gaʁd lə dwa\ |
| Letters | 54 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 0 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Where “quand le sage montre la Lune, l’idiot regarde le doigt” sits in French frequency
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The French entry for quand le sage montre la Lune, l’idiot regarde le doigt is 54 letters long, classified as a phrase, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as \kɑ̃ lə saʒ mɔ̃.tʁə la lyn l‿i.djo ʁə.gaʁd lə dwa\. 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: "Certaines personnes peu réfléchies n’arrivent pas à voir ce qui est pertinent.".
No misspelling variants are generated for quand le sage montre la Lune, l’idiot regarde le doigt 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 quand le sage montre la Lune, l’idiot regarde le doigt, spelled Q-U-A-N-D- -L-E- -S-A-G-E- -M-O-N-T-R-E- -L-A- -L-U-N-E-,- -L-’-I-D-I-O-T- -R-E-G-A-R-D-E- -L-E- -D-O-I-G-T, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.
Definition
- 1Certaines personnes peu réfléchies n’arrivent pas à voir ce qui est pertinent.
Frequently Asked Questions
How do you spell "quand le sage montre la Lune, l’idiot regarde le doigt"?
What does "quand le sage montre la Lune, l’idiot regarde le doigt" mean?
How do you pronounce "quand le sage montre la Lune, l’idiot regarde le doigt"?
What language does "quand le sage montre la Lune, l’idiot regarde le doigt" come from?
Is PlainSpell free to use?
Using “quand le sage montre la Lune, l’idiot regarde le doigt”
The practical upshot for anyone who landed here from a spell-check.
- The one correct French spelling is Q-U-A-N-D- -L-E- -S-A-G-E- -M-O-N-T-R-E- -L-A- -L-U-N-E-,- -L-’-I-D-I-O-T- -R-E-G-A-R-D-E- -L-E- -D-O-I-G-T — every other letter order is a misspelling in standard orthography.
- Say it as \kɑ̃ lə saʒ mɔ̃.tʁə la lyn l‿i.djo ʁə.gaʁd lə dwa\ (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 Q in our French index: