Did you know there was a difference between Fiancé vs. Fiancée?
No, these spellings are not interchangeable. There is quite a significant difference between them, in fact. Fiancé refers to a male engaged to be married, while fiancée refers to a female engaged to be married. If you have trouble remembering which is which, I’ve devised a handy mnemonic that’s relatively straightforward, assuming that you have rudimentary knowledge of biology.
The typical human has 46 chromosomes – if you don’t know what a chromosome is, then don’t worry, because that’s not the ultimate lesson here. Two of these chromosomes are called sex chromosomes, since they are what determine a person’s gender. There are two varieties of sex chromosomes: X and Y. Females have two X chromosomes (XX), while males have one X chromosome and one Y chromosome (XY). It is possible for people to have one or three sex chromosomes and still live, but that is abnormal and irrelevant to the point I’m trying to make.
Just as the number of X chromosomes indicates a person’s gender, it indicates the number of E’s that should be present at the end of the word. A male has one X chromosome, so you should add one E: fiancé. A female has two X chromosomes, so you should add two E’s: fiancée. An accent is placed over the first E in both cases.
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