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Examples of faux pasĮvery year numerous tourists fall foul of local customers failing to brush up on the cultural faux pas of the destinations they visit. However, we do make a distinction in the pronunciation-the singular faux pas is pronounced, but the plural faux pas is pronounced with a “z” at the end. Faux pas is how you spell both the plural and the singular form of the phrase. In the English language, we more or less take the page from the French’s book. The plural is written the same as the singular, faux pas, and there’s no difference in pronunciation either. We know that faux pas, the singular form, is pronounced. Since faux pas is a French phrase, let’s see how the French pluralize it. But since that’s not always possible, there has to be a way to say “more than one faux pas”-it has to have a plural.
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If you really have to make social blunders, it would be best to keep them to a minimum. This meaning isn’t so far removed from the original-“to make a breach of good manners,” or “to compromise one’s reputation.” The plural of faux pas : French So to say that someone made a faux pas is to say that someone made a social blunder. But in faux pas, it means false, and the whole phrase means “false step,” or “misstep.”įaux pas is most commonly used to denote an embarrassing mistake made in a social context. The two words that constitute the phrase are faux, which means “false,” and pas, which means “dance step.” Over time, faux has also acquired the meaning “fake,” which is the sense we’re familiar with from the phrase faux fur. Write with Grammarly The origin and the meaning of faux pasįaux pas is a loan phrase from French that’s been used in English since the seventeenth century-the 1670s, to be more precise.
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