tête-bêche
/tɛtˈbɛʃ/
Word Rarity
Very rare
Frequency: Zipf frequency 0.00 in modern English
14
Scrabble Score
9
Letters
2
Syllables
6
Unique Chars
Meaning
adj
Of a postage stamp, printed upside down relative to the following stamp of the same row or column.
Example Sentences
- "Liu himself is a professional stamp collector, and in 1972 he bought a tête-bêche pair of Qing dynasty stamps from an auction in London."
- "It's an odd little confection, the tête-bêche, but it's oddly pleasing. Each author gets a fair crack of the whip, with their own cover and top-billing, and the illusion of two separate books makes a head-to-tail volume seem somehow to be good value."
Etymology
From French tête-bêche (literally “head-to-foot”).
Origin
- Source language: French
Word Breakdown
- Root: tête-bêche