Fiancé(e)

I’m reading a Regency romance novel at the moment, and as well as being a light, relaxing read, it’s proving fertile ground for blog post ideas. Last night, the word “fiancé” jumped off my Kindle and reminded me that I’ve wanted to write about this very term for a while.

There are two aspects to discuss relating to this word, or should I say “pair of words”, as we can’t discuss “fiancé” without also talking about “fiancée”. These terms are just two of many borrowings from French that have been absorbed into the English language over the years. So, when did these newcomers arrive? Which spelling should be used, and does that even matter?

Let’s address those two spellings first. To put it quite simply, “fiancé” is for a man who is engaged and “fiancée” for a woman. This is down to the words being French and the French language, unlike English, having grammatical gender. To differentiate between masculine and feminine, the general rule for regular words is that an extra “e” is added to the end of the masculine to form the feminine.

Now we’ve got that one sorted out, when did these terms start to be used in English? In the days before they were adopted, an English speaker would talk about their betrothed or intended, but there seems to be some debate between different dictionaries as to when exactly the words “fiancé” and “fiancée” first appeared as rivals to their older counterparts. Etymonline, the online etymological dictionary, suggests the earliest dates, with “fiancé” being used as a French word in English in 1826 and “fiancée” in 1837. Neither was accepted as a standard term until somewhat later though. The OED gives its first written example as “fiancée” in 1853, and it’s clear from Google Ngram that both variants of the word only began to appear in print from the 1850s. It wasn’t until just before the First World War, though, that they overtook “betrothed” as the term of choice for someone engaged to be married. So, if you’re writing a book set before the early 1900s, you’d probably be advised not to use “fiancé/fiancée”, and it would certainly be an anachronism if your novel takes place before the 1850s.

So there you have it – a brief look at our words for today. I hope that you’ve found this post engaging and now feel more confident about using the correct term for your intended time and purpose.