Word.ws English Dictionary

parley-vous

parley-vous is the alternative form of parleyvoo.

Meaning of parleyvoo

Noun

parleyvoo (countable and uncountable, plural parleyvoos)

  1. The French language, especially as understood by an English person.
    • Lynch. Let him alone. He's back from Paris […] Zoe. O go on! Give us some parleyvoo.1922 February 2, James Joyce, Ulysses, Paris: Shakespeare and Company […], →OCLC
  2. (archaic, countable) A French person.
    • [O]ne of these d—d Parlivoos will go farther with some women in a day, than an Englishman in a month—all owing to their impudence; for a common man has as much impudence in France as a man-midwife has in England.1789, John Moore, Zeluco, Valancourt, published 2008, page 276

See all 3 meanings of parleyvoo

Forms of parley-vous

Verb
third-person singular presentparley-vouses
present participleparley-vousing
past participleparley-voused
pastparley-voused
Noun
pluralparley-vous

Questions about parley-vous

What is parley-vous the alternative form of?
Parley-vous is the alternative form of parleyvoo.

Words near parley-vous in the dictionary

  1. parley
  2. parley-voo
  3. parley-vooed
  4. parley-vooing
  5. parley-voos
  6. parley-vous
  7. parleyed
  8. parleyer
  9. parleyers
  10. parleying
  11. parleyings

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: parley-vous (page history and authors); parleyvoo (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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Cite this entry: “parley-vous.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/parley-vous. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.