"mot juste" meaning in English

See mot juste in All languages combined, or Wiktionary

Noun

IPA: /məʊˈʒuːst/ [UK] Forms: mots justes [plural]
Rhymes: -uːst Etymology: Unadapted borrowing from French mot juste. Etymology templates: {{ubor|en|fr|mot juste}} Unadapted borrowing from French mot juste Head templates: {{en-noun|mots justes|nolinkhead=1}} mot juste (plural mots justes)
  1. The perfectly appropriate word or phrase for the situation. Synonyms: winged word Translations (perfectly appropriate word or phrase): 最貼切的字眼 (Chinese Mandarin), 最贴切的字眼 (zuì tiēqiè de zìyǎn) (Chinese Mandarin), osuva ilmaus (Finnish), mot juste [masculine] (French), richtiger / passender / zutreffender Ausdruck [masculine] (German), richtiges / passendes / treffendes Wort [neuter] (German)
    Sense id: en-mot_juste-en-noun-42C00Lr- Categories (other): English entries with incorrect language header

Inflected forms

Download JSON data for mot juste meaning in English (2.4kB)

{
  "etymology_templates": [
    {
      "args": {
        "1": "en",
        "2": "fr",
        "3": "mot juste"
      },
      "expansion": "Unadapted borrowing from French mot juste",
      "name": "ubor"
    }
  ],
  "etymology_text": "Unadapted borrowing from French mot juste.",
  "forms": [
    {
      "form": "mots justes",
      "tags": [
        "plural"
      ]
    }
  ],
  "head_templates": [
    {
      "args": {
        "1": "mots justes",
        "nolinkhead": "1"
      },
      "expansion": "mot juste (plural mots justes)",
      "name": "en-noun"
    }
  ],
  "lang": "English",
  "lang_code": "en",
  "pos": "noun",
  "senses": [
    {
      "categories": [
        {
          "kind": "other",
          "name": "English entries with incorrect language header",
          "parents": [
            "Entries with incorrect language header",
            "Entry maintenance"
          ],
          "source": "w"
        }
      ],
      "examples": [
        {
          "ref": "1960, P. G. Wodehouse, Jeeves in the Offing, chapter V",
          "text": "She legged it, and for a moment silence reigned. Then Bobbie said, “Phew!” and I agreed that “Phew!” was the mot juste.",
          "type": "quotation"
        },
        {
          "ref": "2014 March 23, David Streitfeld, “Web Fiction, Serialized and Social”, in New York Times",
          "text": "Wattpad is not the sort of site where writers talk about suffering for their art or spend hours searching for the mot juste.",
          "type": "quotation"
        }
      ],
      "glosses": [
        "The perfectly appropriate word or phrase for the situation."
      ],
      "id": "en-mot_juste-en-noun-42C00Lr-",
      "links": [
        [
          "perfectly",
          "perfectly"
        ],
        [
          "appropriate",
          "appropriate#Adjective"
        ],
        [
          "word",
          "word#Noun"
        ],
        [
          "phrase",
          "phrase#Noun"
        ],
        [
          "situation",
          "situation"
        ]
      ],
      "synonyms": [
        {
          "word": "winged word"
        }
      ],
      "translations": [
        {
          "code": "cmn",
          "lang": "Chinese Mandarin",
          "sense": "perfectly appropriate word or phrase",
          "word": "最貼切的字眼"
        },
        {
          "code": "cmn",
          "lang": "Chinese Mandarin",
          "roman": "zuì tiēqiè de zìyǎn",
          "sense": "perfectly appropriate word or phrase",
          "word": "最贴切的字眼"
        },
        {
          "code": "fi",
          "lang": "Finnish",
          "sense": "perfectly appropriate word or phrase",
          "word": "osuva ilmaus"
        },
        {
          "code": "fr",
          "lang": "French",
          "sense": "perfectly appropriate word or phrase",
          "tags": [
            "masculine"
          ],
          "word": "mot juste"
        },
        {
          "code": "de",
          "lang": "German",
          "sense": "perfectly appropriate word or phrase",
          "tags": [
            "masculine"
          ],
          "word": "richtiger / passender / zutreffender Ausdruck"
        },
        {
          "code": "de",
          "lang": "German",
          "sense": "perfectly appropriate word or phrase",
          "tags": [
            "neuter"
          ],
          "word": "richtiges / passendes / treffendes Wort"
        }
      ]
    }
  ],
  "sounds": [
    {
      "ipa": "/məʊˈʒuːst/",
      "tags": [
        "UK"
      ]
    },
    {
      "rhymes": "-uːst"
    }
  ],
  "word": "mot juste"
}
{
  "etymology_templates": [
    {
      "args": {
        "1": "en",
        "2": "fr",
        "3": "mot juste"
      },
      "expansion": "Unadapted borrowing from French mot juste",
      "name": "ubor"
    }
  ],
  "etymology_text": "Unadapted borrowing from French mot juste.",
  "forms": [
    {
      "form": "mots justes",
      "tags": [
        "plural"
      ]
    }
  ],
  "head_templates": [
    {
      "args": {
        "1": "mots justes",
        "nolinkhead": "1"
      },
      "expansion": "mot juste (plural mots justes)",
      "name": "en-noun"
    }
  ],
  "lang": "English",
  "lang_code": "en",
  "pos": "noun",
  "senses": [
    {
      "categories": [
        "English countable nouns",
        "English entries with incorrect language header",
        "English lemmas",
        "English multiword terms",
        "English nouns",
        "English terms borrowed from French",
        "English terms derived from French",
        "English terms with IPA pronunciation",
        "English terms with quotations",
        "English unadapted borrowings from French",
        "Rhymes:English/uːst",
        "Rhymes:English/uːst/2 syllables"
      ],
      "examples": [
        {
          "ref": "1960, P. G. Wodehouse, Jeeves in the Offing, chapter V",
          "text": "She legged it, and for a moment silence reigned. Then Bobbie said, “Phew!” and I agreed that “Phew!” was the mot juste.",
          "type": "quotation"
        },
        {
          "ref": "2014 March 23, David Streitfeld, “Web Fiction, Serialized and Social”, in New York Times",
          "text": "Wattpad is not the sort of site where writers talk about suffering for their art or spend hours searching for the mot juste.",
          "type": "quotation"
        }
      ],
      "glosses": [
        "The perfectly appropriate word or phrase for the situation."
      ],
      "links": [
        [
          "perfectly",
          "perfectly"
        ],
        [
          "appropriate",
          "appropriate#Adjective"
        ],
        [
          "word",
          "word#Noun"
        ],
        [
          "phrase",
          "phrase#Noun"
        ],
        [
          "situation",
          "situation"
        ]
      ],
      "synonyms": [
        {
          "word": "winged word"
        }
      ]
    }
  ],
  "sounds": [
    {
      "ipa": "/məʊˈʒuːst/",
      "tags": [
        "UK"
      ]
    },
    {
      "rhymes": "-uːst"
    }
  ],
  "translations": [
    {
      "code": "cmn",
      "lang": "Chinese Mandarin",
      "sense": "perfectly appropriate word or phrase",
      "word": "最貼切的字眼"
    },
    {
      "code": "cmn",
      "lang": "Chinese Mandarin",
      "roman": "zuì tiēqiè de zìyǎn",
      "sense": "perfectly appropriate word or phrase",
      "word": "最贴切的字眼"
    },
    {
      "code": "fi",
      "lang": "Finnish",
      "sense": "perfectly appropriate word or phrase",
      "word": "osuva ilmaus"
    },
    {
      "code": "fr",
      "lang": "French",
      "sense": "perfectly appropriate word or phrase",
      "tags": [
        "masculine"
      ],
      "word": "mot juste"
    },
    {
      "code": "de",
      "lang": "German",
      "sense": "perfectly appropriate word or phrase",
      "tags": [
        "masculine"
      ],
      "word": "richtiger / passender / zutreffender Ausdruck"
    },
    {
      "code": "de",
      "lang": "German",
      "sense": "perfectly appropriate word or phrase",
      "tags": [
        "neuter"
      ],
      "word": "richtiges / passendes / treffendes Wort"
    }
  ],
  "word": "mot juste"
}

This page is a part of the kaikki.org machine-readable English dictionary. This dictionary is based on structured data extracted on 2024-05-20 from the enwiktionary dump dated 2024-05-02 using wiktextract (1d5a7d1 and 304864d). The data shown on this site has been post-processed and various details (e.g., extra categories) removed, some information disambiguated, and additional data merged from other sources. See the raw data download page for the unprocessed wiktextract data.

If you use this data in academic research, please cite Tatu Ylonen: Wiktextract: Wiktionary as Machine-Readable Structured Data, Proceedings of the 13th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC), pp. 1317-1325, Marseille, 20-25 June 2022. Linking to the relevant page(s) under https://kaikki.org would also be greatly appreciated.