fiancée

Or fi·an·cee

[fee-ahn-sey, fee-ahn-sey]

noun

1. a woman engaged to be married.

fiancée

/ fɪˈɒnseɪ /

noun

1. a woman who is engaged to be married

Gender Note

When French words describe or name people, they are inflected to match the gender of the person. To mark a noun or adjective as feminine, French adds an unaccented letter e at the end of a word. If the person engaged to be married is a man, he’s a fiancé . The bride-to-be is a fiancée . This distinction is usually preserved in English language use of these words: fiancé for a man, fiancée for a woman. However, it is also common for borrowed words to lose some foreign characteristics. This is why, for example, words like cliché , fiancée , or résumé may be written in English without accent marks. Such an omission in French would be an error, resulting in the wrong pronunciation of these words, but in English, it is acceptable to lose this foreign feature. Similarly, some English speakers will completely drop the gender agreement in the fiancé — fiancée distinction, using fiancé for both men and women. The prescriptive rules of English grammar do not encourage the reduction to a single form, though it is a natural phenomenon for words borrowed into English to neutralize gender markings. The adjective née presents a slightly different case. The feminine inflection of this French word is the commonly borrowed form, since women are usually the ones to distinguish their maiden names from their married ones. However, the masculine form né would be the appropriate one for a man in reference to his original last name, in the increasingly common event of the groom’s name changing with his marriage. The spelling with the extra e is the marked feminine form and should be used to name or describe a woman: née , divorcée , fiancée . If you choose to spell these French words with their accents, be sure to place them correctly. For words ending in ée, the accented é is the first of the two.

Word History and Origins

Origin of fiancée¹

First recorded in 1850–55; from French; feminine of fiancé

Example Sentences

My drive to be productive probably cost me my first marriage and a few days ago almost cost me my fiancée.

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The brothers regularly discuss the news in their lives—just a couple months prior, Kelce’s soon-to-be fiancée Taylor Swift joined them to announce the title and release date of her latest album.

Read more on The Wall Street Journal

These days especially, given his NFL superstardom and world-famous fiancée, there’s no shortage of companies reaching out to partner with the tight end.

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Since we’ve known from the opening moments that Morgan and Jonah belong together, all that really remains is for the script, by Susan McMartin from the novel by Colleen Hoover, to find a way to get her husband and his fiancée out of the picture.

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I was also happy to finally see one of the men walk his fiancee back to her side of the room once they have to part ways.

Read more on Los Angeles Times