Silhouette

How to spell silhouette

10 letters · 3 syllables

119 of the 342 people asked to spell silhouette in Spelling Garden got it wrong the first time.

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

sillhouette silhouette

What people typed instead

• sillhouette22 people
• silhoutte14 people
• sillouette10 people
• sillouhette9 people
• silouette9 people
• silouhette9 people

How to pronounce silhouette

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does silhouette mean?

1. nounThe dark outline or shape of a person or object seen against a lighter background.

Silhouette in a sentence

• Her silhouette stood out at sunset.

• I could see his silhouette against the window.

• The mountains' silhouette at dusk was breathtaking.

Where does silhouette come from?

Language of origin: French

This word comes from the French surname Silhouette, specifically Etienne de Silhouette, who served as France's controller-general of finances in 1759. He became notorious for his harsh economy measures during a financial crisis, and his name quickly turned into a byword for anything done cheaply or reduced to bare essentials. A profile portrait cut from black paper was one of the cheapest ways to capture someone's likeness, so such outline images came to be called portraits a la silhouette, meaning done in the stingy manner of Silhouette. English borrowed the word in the early 1800s and broadened it to mean any dark shape seen against a lighter background. The unusual cluster of vowels, the silent h, and the doubled t at the end all survive from the original French spelling, which is exactly why the word is such a reliable spelling trap.

How the word is built

• silhouette (from the surname Silhouette)
• no productive affixes; treat as a single borrowed root

People who misspell silhouette also struggle with

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

• supersede 89% of them got it wrong
• lien 87% of them got it wrong
• auxiliary 86% of them got it wrong
• gubernatorial 85% of them got it wrong
• connoisseur 85% of them got it wrong
• idiosyncrasy 83% of them got it wrong