Silhouette

How to spell silhouette

10 letters · 3 syllables

43 of the 158 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

• sillhouette9 people
• silhoutte8 people
• silouhette6 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.

• connoisseur 81% of them got it wrong
• idiosyncrasy 74% of them got it wrong
• reconnaissance 72% of them got it wrong