se salir les mains
The verdict
“se salir les mains” 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
- 18
- letters
Dominant Wiktionary sense: Couvrir ses mains de saleté, les rendre sales.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | se salir les mains |
| Language | French |
| Part of speech | Verb |
| IPA | \sə sa.liʁ le mɛ̃\ |
| Letters | 18 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 0 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Where “se salir les mains” sits in French frequency
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The French entry for se salir les mains is 18 letters long, classified as a verb, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as \sə sa.liʁ le mɛ̃\. 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 se salir les mains 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 se salir les mains, spelled S-E- -S-A-L-I-R- -L-E-S- -M-A-I-N-S, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.
Definition
- 1Couvrir ses mains de saleté, les rendre sales.
- 2Se compromettre, se mettre à agir de manière malhonnête.
- 3Se mettre au travail.
This word in other languages
Frequently Asked Questions
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Using “se salir les mains”
The practical upshot for anyone who landed here from a spell-check.
- The one correct French spelling is S-E- -S-A-L-I-R- -L-E-S- -M-A-I-N-S — every other letter order is a misspelling in standard orthography.
- Say it as \sə sa.liʁ le mɛ̃\ (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 S in our French index: