you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours
The verdict
“you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours” 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
- 42
- letters
Dominant Wiktionary sense: Donnant donnant, on n’a rien pour rien.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours |
| Language | French |
| Part of speech | Phrase |
| IPA | \juː skɹætʃ maɪ bæk ənd aɪl skɹætʃ jɔːɹz\ |
| Letters | 42 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 0 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Where “you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours” sits in French frequency
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The French entry for you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours is 42 letters long, classified as a phrase, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as \juː skɹætʃ maɪ bæk ənd aɪl skɹætʃ jɔːɹz\. 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: "Donnant donnant, on n’a rien pour rien.".
No misspelling variants are generated for you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours 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 scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours, spelled Y-O-U- -S-C-R-A-T-C-H- -M-Y- -B-A-C-K- -A-N-D- -I-’-L-L- -S-C-R-A-T-C-H- -Y-O-U-R-S, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.
Definition
- 1Donnant donnant, on n’a rien pour rien.
Synonyms
Frequently Asked Questions
How do you spell "you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours"?
What does "you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours" mean?
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Using “you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours”
The practical upshot for anyone who landed here from a spell-check.
- The one correct French spelling is Y-O-U- -S-C-R-A-T-C-H- -M-Y- -B-A-C-K- -A-N-D- -I-’-L-L- -S-C-R-A-T-C-H- -Y-O-U-R-S — every other letter order is a misspelling in standard orthography.
- Say it as \juː skɹætʃ maɪ bæk ənd aɪl skɹætʃ jɔːɹz\ (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: