fiancée

American  

[fee-ahn-sey, fee-ahn-sey] / ˌfi ɑnˈseɪ, fiˈɑn seɪ /

Or fiancee

noun

1. a woman engaged to be married.

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fiancée British  

/ fɪˈɒnseɪ /

noun

1. a woman who is engaged to be married

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Gender

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.

Etymology

Origin of fiancée

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

Example Sentences

Ernest and his long-suffering fiancée had come to the bank in the hope of securing a loan to turn a habit of solving crimes into a legitimate business.

From The Wall Street Journal

His love for his new fiancée—he only recently ended his fraught marriage to the actress Patricia Neal, having begun his liaison with Liccy well before its dissolution—comes through in moments of quick, quiet intimacy.

From The Wall Street Journal

In the hours before that flight departed, Doustshenas and his fiancée, Forough Khadem, exchanged messages about a recent strike on a U.S. military base in Iraq and whether it was safe to fly.

From The Wall Street Journal

Then a blur seemed to move over the scene, for Karel was saying, “Corrie, I want you to meet my fiancée.”

From Literature

Lakers superstar Luka Doncic is attempting to bring his two daughters to the United States from his native Slovenia after separating from his fiancée, Anamaria Goltes.

From Los Angeles Times

Related Words

• affianced
• affianced person
• betrothed
• bride-to-be
• engaged person
• future mate
• future wife
• intended
• prospective spouse
• wife-to-be