secouer la tête
\sə.kwe la tɛt\
The verdict
“secouer la tête” 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
- 15
- letters
According to Wiktionary data (CC BY-SA, analyzed May 6, 2026) — Dire non par des mouvements de la tête ; tourner la tête plusieurs fois (horizontalement) par dépit.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | secouer la tête |
| Language | French |
| Part of speech | Verb |
| IPA | \sə.kwe la tɛt\ |
| Letters | 15 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 0 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Where “secouer la tête” sits in French frequency
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The French entry for secouer la tête is 15 letters long, classified as a verb, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as \sə.kwe la tɛt\. 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: "Dire non par des mouvements de la tête ; tourner la tête plusieurs fois (horizontalement) par dépit.".
No misspelling variants are generated for secouer la tête 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 secouer la tête, spelled S-E-C-O-U-E-R- -L-A- -T-Ê-T-E, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.
Definition
- 1Dire non par des mouvements de la tête ; tourner la tête plusieurs fois (horizontalement) par dépit.
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, “secouer la tête, 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/secouer-la-tete
Frequently Asked Questions
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Using “secouer la tête”
The practical upshot for anyone who landed here from a spell-check.
- The one correct French spelling is S-E-C-O-U-E-R- -L-A- -T-Ê-T-E - every other letter order is a misspelling in standard orthography.
- Say it as \sə.kwe la tɛt\ (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: