Rendezvous

How to spell rendezvous

10 letters · 3 syllables

93 of the 196 people asked to spell rendezvous in Spelling Garden got it wrong the first time.

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

rendevous rendezvous

What people typed instead

• rendevous29 people
• rendevouz11 people
• rendesvous10 people
• rendesvouz6 people
• rendezvouz5 people
• rondevous4 people

How to pronounce rendezvous

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does rendezvous mean?

1. nounA prearranged meeting at an agreed time and place, or the place itself where people agree to meet.

Rendezvous in a sentence

• We have a rendezvous at the café.

• Our rendezvous point is the café at noon.

• We arranged a rendezvous for next Friday.

Where does rendezvous come from?

Language of origin: French

This word comes straight from French, where the phrase rendez-vous literally meant 'present yourselves' or 'betake yourselves to a place'. It was built from the verb rendre, meaning 'to give back' or 'to deliver', and the pronoun vous, meaning 'you', so the original sense was an order: 'go and present yourselves here'. By the late 1500s English had absorbed it as a noun for a fixed meeting place, especially a military one where troops were ordered to assemble. The fossilised French spelling is exactly what traps modern writers: the silent 'z', the unexpected 'dez', and the final 'vous' that sounds like 'voo' all defy English spelling habits. The same rendre root also gives us 'render' and 'surrender', though none of them warns you about that stubborn silent ending.

How the word is built

• rendez (from French rendez-vous: present yourselves)
• vous (you, plural/formal)

People who misspell rendezvous also struggle with

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

• idiosyncrasy 84% of them got it wrong
• connoisseur 80% of them got it wrong
• reconnaissance 70% of them got it wrong
• manoeuvre 53% of them got it wrong
• bourgeois 50% of them got it wrong
• entrepreneurial 43% of them got it wrong