you can’t judge a book by its cover
The verdict
“you can’t judge a book by its cover” 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
- 35
- letters
Dominant Wiktionary sense: L’habit ne fait pas le moine.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | you can’t judge a book by its cover |
| Language | French |
| Part of speech | Phrase |
| IPA | \ju ˈkænt dʒʌdʒ ə bʊk baɪ ɪts ˈkʌv.ɚ\ |
| Letters | 35 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 0 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Where “you can’t judge a book by its cover” sits in French frequency
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The French entry for you can’t judge a book by its cover is 35 letters long, classified as a phrase, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as \ju ˈkænt dʒʌdʒ ə bʊk baɪ ɪts ˈkʌv.ɚ\. 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: "L’habit ne fait pas le moine.".
No misspelling variants are generated for you can’t judge a book by its cover 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 you can’t judge a book by its cover, spelled Y-O-U- -C-A-N-’-T- -J-U-D-G-E- -A- -B-O-O-K- -B-Y- -I-T-S- -C-O-V-E-R, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.
Definition
- 1L’habit ne fait pas le moine.
Synonyms
Frequently Asked Questions
How do you spell "you can’t judge a book by its cover"?
What does "you can’t judge a book by its cover" mean?
How do you pronounce "you can’t judge a book by its cover"?
What language does "you can’t judge a book by its cover" come from?
Is PlainSpell free to use?
Using “you can’t judge a book by its cover”
The practical upshot for anyone who landed here from a spell-check.
- The one correct French spelling is Y-O-U- -C-A-N-’-T- -J-U-D-G-E- -A- -B-O-O-K- -B-Y- -I-T-S- -C-O-V-E-R — every other letter order is a misspelling in standard orthography.
- Say it as \ju ˈkænt dʒʌdʒ ə bʊk baɪ ɪts ˈkʌv.ɚ\ (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 Y in our French index: