Molière

American  

[mohl-yair, maw-lyer] / moʊlˈyɛər, mɔˈlyɛr /

noun

1. Jean Baptiste Poquelin, 1622–73, French actor and playwright.

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Molière British  

/ mɔljɛr /

noun

1. real name Jean-Baptiste Poquelin. 1622–73, French dramatist, regarded as the greatest French writer of comedy. His works include Tartuffe (1664), Le Misanthrope (1666), L'Avare (1668), Le Bourgeois gentilhomme (1670), and Le Malade imaginaire (1673)

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Molière Cultural  

1. Nom de plume of Jean Baptiste Poquelin, a seventeenth-century French playwright. He is best known for his comedies of satire, such as The Misanthrope and Tartuffe.

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Example Sentences

I am thankful to have grown up in a bilingual country and to have attended a high school where we studied Molière in French and Shakespeare in English.

From The Wall Street Journal • Apr. 1, 2026

But it strikes a false and pandering note, since Tartuffe, as in Molière, has been plainly exposed as an opportunistic, lascivious fraud—and the only one in the play.

From The Wall Street Journal • Dec. 17, 2025

Where Molière stands out, however, is as a sharp social satirist whose denouncing of the vain, the hypocritical and the simply deluded have not aged — once timely, they are now timeless.

From New York Times • May 3, 2024

Teenagers are, like Molière, keen to discover and condemn adult duplicity.

From New York Times • May 11, 2023

Rabelais dissatisfies him; Scarron dissatisfies him; Molière, Swift, Sterne, not to mention others, dissatisfy him.

From The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, No. 68, June, 1863 by Various