tête-bêche
/tɛtˈbɛʃ/
tête-bêche adjective: of a postage stamp, printed upside down relative to the following stamp of the same row or column.
Adjective
tête-bêche (not comparable)
- Of a postage stamp, printed upside down relative to the following stamp of the same row or column.
- 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.2017, David Der-wei Wang, A New Literary History of Modern China, Harvard University Press, →ISBN, page 704
Noun
tête-bêche (plural tête-bêches)
- A book where two texts are bound together, with one text rotated 180° relative to the other, such that when one text runs head-to-tail, the other runs tail-to-head.
- 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.2011 July 28, David Barnett, “Tête-bêche books make a speculative return”, in The Guardian
Forms of tête-bêche
| plural | tête-bêches |
|---|
Origin of tête-bêche
From French tête-bêche (literally “head-to-foot”).
Words that rhyme with tête-bêche
21 more rhymesFewer rhymes
Questions about tête-bêche
- What does tête-bêche mean?
- Tête-bêche means of a postage stamp, printed upside down relative to the following stamp of the same row or column.
- What part of speech is tête-bêche?
- Tête-bêche can be an adjective or a noun.
- How do you pronounce tête-bêche?
- Tête-bêche is pronounced /tɛtˈbɛʃ/.
Words near tête-bêche in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: tête-bêche (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: “tête-bêche.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/t%C3%AAte-b%C3%AAche. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.