Word.ws English Dictionary

bête noir

bête noir is the misspelling of bête noire.

Meaning of bête noire

Noun

bête noire (plural bêtes noires)

  1. Someone or something that is unbearable and so particularly avoided or disliked; the bane of someone's existence; an object of aversion; an anathema.
    • [A] petticoated politician was [Napoleon] Bonaparte's bête noire, or antipathy, […]1833 October, “Art. V.—Mémoires de Madame la Duchesse d’Abrantes, ou Souvenirs Historiques sur Napoleon, la Revolution, le Directoire, le Consulat, l’Empire, et la Restauration. Tom. VII.—XII. 8vo....
    Synonyms:
    antipathy, bugbear

Questions about bête noir

What is bête noir the misspelling of?
Bête noir is the misspelling of bête noire.

Words near bête noir in the dictionary

  1. Bézout's lemma
  2. Bézout's theorem
  3. bêche de mer
  4. bêche-de-mer
  5. bêches-de-mer
  6. bête noir
  7. bête noire
  8. bête rouge
  9. bêtes noires
  10. bêtes rouges
  11. bêtise

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: bête noir (page history and authors); bête noire (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Vealhurl-bête noir.wav.

Cite this entry: “bête noir.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/b%C3%AAte_noir. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.