What does fille mean?
Fille is the French word for a girl or young woman, adopted into English chiefly as a literary term and as the head of several borrowed phrases. In its plainest sense it denotes a girl or daughter, though English writers today rarely use it outside quotations and Gallicized contexts. Its most familiar appearances are in expressions like 'jeune fille' (a young woman), 'petite fille' (a little girl), and 'fille de chambre' (a chambermaid). One historically resonant phrase is 'filles du roi', referring to the roughly eight hundred young women sent by Louis XIV to New France between 1663 and 1673 to marry settlers and help populate the colony — many Canadians can trace their ancestry to them. Related English words include filly, once a diminutive of the same root, and the legal terms affiliate and filiation, which descend from the Latin filius or filia, meaning son or daughter. Because it is transparent to any student of French but obscure to others, fille functions as a marker of register: elegant, slightly old-fashioned, and unmistakably French in flavor.
nounA girl or young woman; a daughter. An English borrowing from French, now chiefly literary or used in French phrases.
- A girl or young woman (chiefly literary or in French phrases)
- A daughter
"The portrait depicted a fille of perhaps sixteen, gazing shyly from the canvas."
"She played the part of the innocent fille with surprising depth."
"The novel opens on a jeune fille waiting at a Parisian café."
Regular plural, pronounced /fiːlz/.
"The ballroom was filled with jeunes filles in white dresses."
In 17th-century New France, some 800 orphan girls sent across the Atlantic as brides became known as the filles du roi — the king's daughters.
Reviewed by Deb Chak, Editor. AI-assisted content curated by RJS Tech Solutions LLP.
Etymology of fille
Fille comes directly from Old French 'fille' (girl, daughter), which derives from Latin 'filia', the feminine form of 'filius' (son). The same Latin root gives English 'filial', relating to a child's relation to parents, and 'affiliate'. A distant cousin is 'filly', a young female horse, borrowed via Old Norse 'fylla', itself influenced by Old French forms. The word entered English during the medieval period through contact with French and survives mainly in borrowed phrases rather than as everyday vocabulary.
How fille is actually used
Fille is rare in ordinary English prose and survives mostly in fixed French expressions such as 'fille de chambre' (chambermaid) or 'jeune fille' (young woman), where it retains its French flavor. It carries no negative connotation in English, but writers should be aware that 'fille de joie' is a euphemism for a prostitute. The word reads as deliberately literary or Gallic in tone.
Easily confused with fille
A fillet is a strip of meat or a thin band; a fille is simply a girl.
A filly is a young female horse, whereas a fille is a girl or young woman.