Meaning & use

enfant

noun·Advanced

The French word for child, occurring in English mainly within borrowed phrases such as enfant terrible.

See it in a sentence

Critics called the young director an enfant terrible for breaking every rule of traditional cinema.

As a teenager, she was something of an enfant terrible in the world of competitive chess.

A note on using this word

Enfant rarely stands alone in English; it almost always appears inside a fixed French loanphrase such as enfant terrible.

Words with a similar meaning

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