Coupe

How to spell coupe

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce coupe

What does coupe mean?

1. nounA car with a fixed roof, a sloping back, and usually two doors.
2. nounA shallow, broad-bowled stemmed glass used for champagne or for serving desserts.

Coupe in a sentence

• He traded the family saloon for a sporty two-door coupe.

• The bartender poured the cocktail into a chilled coupe.

• The dealership lined up a silver coupe next to the convertible.

• She served the chocolate mousse in a tall glass coupe.

Where does coupe come from?

Language of origin: French

This word comes from the French verb couper, meaning 'to cut', and more directly from its past participle coupé, literally 'cut'. In eighteenth century France a carrosse coupé was a 'cut-off carriage', a four-wheeled coach shortened so that it had a single seat inside and only one row of windows. English borrowed the term in the early 1800s for that enclosed two-passenger carriage, and when motoring arrived the name passed naturally to a short, closed, typically two-door car body. The same couper root gives us the unrelated-looking word 'coupon' (originally a piece 'cut off' a sheet) and the dramatic 'coup'. In careful British and French usage the accented form coupé survives, which is why the bare spelling coupe trips writers who half-remember the missing accent and the silent French ending.

How the word is built

• coup- (from French couper: to cut)
• -e (from the French past participle ending)

Words that sound like coupe

They sound the same but mean different things, so the meaning decides which spelling to write.

• coop: A cage or pen for keeping poultry such as chickens or rabbits.