manqué

/ˈmɒŋkeɪ//mɑnˈkeɪ/

manqué adjective: unfulfilled due to the vagary of circumstance, some inherent flaw or a constitutional lack.

Adjective

manqué (not comparable)

(postpositional) Unfulfilled due to the vagary of circumstance, some inherent flaw or a constitutional lack.
- “[…] and all things considered, I don't much regret that this affair with Miss Amory is manquée, though I wished for it once—in fact, all things considered, I am very glad of it.”1848 November – 1850 December, William Makepeace Thackeray, chapter XXXVII, in The History of Pendennis. […], volume II, London: Bradbury and Evans, […], published 1850, →OCLC, page 356
- The rivals now were but rival nurses; and never did a lot of women make more fuss over a child than all these bloodthirsty men did over this Amazon manquée.1866, Charles Reade, chapter VI, in Griffith Gaunt, or Jealousy, Boston: Ticknor and Fields, page 38, column 1

The four possible combinations of values can be named Truth and Falsity (with capital initials) and truth-manqué and falsity-manqué (with lower-case initials).1975, D. Hockney, W. Harper, B. Freed, Contemporary Research in Philosophical Logic and Linguistic Semantics, Springer,, →ISBN, page 78:
Wade (1973): How a Legal Landmark Manqué Became a Constitutional Cause Célèbre1988, Bernard Schwartz, The Unpublished Opinions of the Burger Court, Oxford University Press,, →ISBN, page 83:
So too, says Oakeshott, did the individual manqué, one who feared his freedom and sought to return to the comfort and order of communal life.1994, C. Fred. Alford, Group Psychology and Political Theory, Yale University Press,, →ISBN, page 156:
The H-HB and AGB-manqué stars of high metallicity (say Z>0.07) which are expected to be present albeit in small percentages in the stellar content of bulges and elliptical galaxies in general.1997, Harm Jan Habing, Henny J. G. L. M. Lamers, editors, Planetary Nebulae: Symposium No. 180, International Astronomical Union, Kluwer...

Existing in English from the eighteenth century. Borrowed from French manqué, past participle form of manquer (“to lack, to be lacking in”).

What does manqué mean?: Manqué means unfulfilled due to the vagary of circumstance, some inherent flaw or a constitutional lack.
How do you use manqué in a sentence?: The four possible combinations of values can be named Truth and Falsity (with capital initials) and truth-manqué and falsity-manqué (with lower-case initials).
What part of speech is manqué?: Manqué is an adjective.
How do you pronounce manqué?: Manqué is pronounced /ˈmɒŋkeɪ/ (UK).

Adapted from Wiktionary: manqué (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: 2026-09-02

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Vealhurl-manque.wav, En-us-manque.ogg.

Cite this entry: “manqué.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/manqu%C3%A9. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.