take the bull by the horns
The verdict
“take the bull by the horns” 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
- 26
- letters
Dominant Wiktionary sense: Prendre le taureau par les cornes, agir avec bravoure pour se tirer d’une situation difficile, sans trop se préoccuper des risques.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | take the bull by the horns |
| Language | French |
| Part of speech | Verb |
| IPA | \teɪk ðə bʊl baɪ̯ ðə hɔː(r)nz\ |
| Letters | 26 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 0 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Where “take the bull by the horns” sits in French frequency
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The French entry for take the bull by the horns is 26 letters long, classified as a verb, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as \teɪk ðə bʊl baɪ̯ ðə hɔː(r)nz\. 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: "Prendre le taureau par les cornes, agir avec bravoure pour se tirer d’une situation difficile, sans trop se préoccuper des risques.".
No misspelling variants are generated for take the bull by the horns 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 take the bull by the horns, spelled T-A-K-E- -T-H-E- -B-U-L-L- -B-Y- -T-H-E- -H-O-R-N-S, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.
Definition
- 1Prendre le taureau par les cornes, agir avec bravoure pour se tirer d’une situation difficile, sans trop se préoccuper des risques.
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, “take the bull by the horns, 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/take-the-bull-by-the-horns
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Using “take the bull by the horns”
The practical upshot for anyone who landed here from a spell-check.
- The one correct French spelling is T-A-K-E- -T-H-E- -B-U-L-L- -B-Y- -T-H-E- -H-O-R-N-S - every other letter order is a misspelling in standard orthography.
- Say it as \teɪk ðə bʊl baɪ̯ ðə hɔː(r)nz\ (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 T in our French index: