avant la lettre
The verdict
“avant la lettre” is outside the top-ranked Portuguese vocabulary, used as a phrase — the kind of word writers most often double-check.
- Unranked
- below top-frequency Portuguese
- 15
- letters
Dominant Wiktionary sense: antes que o termo fosse cunhado (a expressão é empregada para assinalar o uso anacrônico de palavra, expressão, conceito etc)
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | avant la lettre |
| Language | Portuguese |
| Part of speech | Phrase |
| Letters | 15 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 0 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Where “avant la lettre” sits in Portuguese frequency
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The Portuguese entry for avant la lettre is 15 letters long, classified as a phrase. 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: "antes que o termo fosse cunhado (a expressão é empregada para assinalar o uso anacrônico de palavra, expressão, conceito etc)".
No misspelling variants are generated for avant la lettre in our index, suggesting the orthography follows predictable Portuguese 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 Portuguese form is avant la lettre, spelled A-V-A-N-T- -L-A- -L-E-T-T-R-E, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.
Definition
- 1antes que o termo fosse cunhado (a expressão é empregada para assinalar o uso anacrônico de palavra, expressão, conceito etc)
Frequently Asked Questions
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Using “avant la lettre”
The practical upshot for anyone who landed here from a spell-check.
- The one correct Portuguese spelling is A-V-A-N-T- -L-A- -L-E-T-T-R-E — every other letter order is a misspelling in standard orthography.
- Browse more Portuguese words and confusable pairs in the same reference. Portuguese words
Nearby Portuguese words
Other entries that begin with the letter A in our Portuguese index: