lettre de cachet
lettre de cachet noun: a warrant issued by the monarch in ancien régime France, especially one which imprisons someone without trial.
Noun
lettre de cachet (plural lettres de cachet)
- A warrant issued by the monarch in ancien régime France, especially one which imprisons someone without trial.
- I lost my temper, and spoke so irreverently of the Grand Monarque, that the next morning I was sent to the Bastile, by virtue of a Lettre de Cachet.1751, [Tobias] Smollett, The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle […], volume (please specify |volume=I to IV), London: Harrison and Co., […], →OCLC
- “Bon Dieu!” thought the old negotiator, “the boy has actually talked the woman round, and she’d get him a wife as she would a toy if Master cried for it. Why are there no such things as lettres-de-cachet—and a Bastille for young fellows of family?”1848 November – 1850 December, William Makepeace Thackeray, chapter 7, in The History of Pendennis. […], volume (please specify |volume=I or II), London: Bradbury and Evans, […], published 1849–1850...
Forms of lettre de cachet
| plural | lettres de cachet |
|---|
Origin of lettre de cachet
From French lettre de cachet.
Questions about lettre de cachet
- What does lettre de cachet mean?
- Lettre de cachet means a warrant issued by the monarch in ancien régime France, especially one which imprisons someone without trial.
- What part of speech is lettre de cachet?
- Lettre de cachet is a noun.
- What is the plural of lettre de cachet?
- The plural of lettre de cachet is lettres de cachet.
Words near lettre de cachet in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: lettre de cachet (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.
Last updated:
Cite this entry: “lettre de cachet.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/lettre_de_cachet. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.