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FRENCH · A WORD WITH POSSIBILITIES

marmite.

pot, cooking pot, marmite

7 characters3 syllables approx.Français language

Meaning & usage

noun/maʁ.mit/
  1. pot, cooking pot, marmite

    feminine
  2. meal prepared in a cooking pot

    feminine · metonymically
  3. (heavy) shell

    feminine · slang
  4. prostitute, especially one past the first youth, the "flesh pot" of the souteneur

    dated · feminine · slang
Where this word comes from

In Middle French (attested 1388) used in the sense of an earthen or metal cooking-pot; later (17th century) also of bombs or grenades from their resemblance to iron cooking-pots. Earlier, the noun Old French marmite meant "hypocrite" (attested 1223); the semantic development is explained as the cooking-pot being covered and not revealing its interior (thus being "hypocritical", as compared to e.g. a cooking-pan or a plate). The etymology of marmite "hypocrite" is explained as a compound of marmotter (“to mutter”) (from an onomatopoeic base mar- "murmur") and mite (“cat”) (an obsolete word for "cat", probably also onomatopoeic, i.e. imitative of meowing, extant only in the compound chattemite), and thus describing a person being evasive by "murmuring" or "meowing" instead of speaking plainly.

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Definitions, grammatical labels, IPA, etymology and examples: Wiktionary contributors, extracted by Kaikki / Wiktextract. Adapted under CC BY-SA 4.0. Selected fields and authored examples are shown; third-party quotations and audio are omitted. See contributor history.

Last enriched 2026-09-10. Definitions are in English. Romanizations are shown when supplied by the source; syllable estimates are omitted for unsupported scripts.