Couture

How to spell couture

7 letters · 2 syllables

36 of the 107 people asked to spell couture in Spelling Garden got it wrong the first time.

The most common mistake is coutoure. The letters people get wrong are highlighted.

coutoure couture

What people typed instead

• coutoure9 people
• cotoure4 people
• coutour4 people
• coture3 people

How to pronounce couture

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does couture mean?

1. nounThe design and creation of exclusive, custom-fitted high fashion clothing.

Couture in a sentence

• The museum exhibited gowns from the golden age of French couture.

• Each piece of couture is hand-stitched and made to measure for a single client.

Where does couture come from?

Language of origin: French

Couture comes straight from modern French, where it means 'sewing', 'needlework', or 'dressmaking'. The French word descends from the Old French costure, which in turn grew out of the Vulgar Latin consutura, a noun built on the Latin verb consuere meaning 'to sew together', combining con- 'together' with suere 'to sew'. That same suere root sits behind the English word 'suture', the surgical stitch, which is a handy reminder that couture is fundamentally about stitching. English adopted the word in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as Paris became the centre of high fashion, and it is most often met in the phrase 'haute couture', literally 'high sewing', meaning exclusive, custom-fitted clothing. Because it keeps its French shape, the tricky spelling trap is the 'ou' followed by the silent French '-e', which English speakers are tempted to drop or respell phonetically.

How the word is built

• coutur- (from French couture: sewing, dressmaking)
• (silent French -e ending retained in English)

People who misspell couture also struggle with

Of the Spelling Garden players who got couture wrong the first time, this is how many also got each of these wrong.

• supersede 94% of them got it wrong
• idiosyncrasy 89% of them got it wrong
• reconnaissance 82% of them got it wrong