manqué

See also: manque

English

Etymology

Existing in English from the eighteenth century. Borrowed from French manqué, past participle form of manquer (“to lack, to be lacking in”).

Pronunciation

• (UK) IPA^(key): /ˈmɒŋkeɪ/
• (US) IPA^(key): /mɑnˈkeɪ/, /mɑŋˈkeɪ/

  • Audio (US):

    (file)

Adjective

manqué (not comparable)

1. (postpositive) Unfulfilled due to the vagary of circumstance, some inherent flaw or a constitutional lack.
   • 1848 November – 1850 December, William Makepeace Thackeray, chapter XXXVII, in The History of Pendennis. […], volume II, London: Bradbury and Evans, […], published 1850, →OCLC, page 356:

     “ […] and all things considered, I don't much regret that this affair with Miss Amory is manquée, though I wished for it once—in fact, all things considered, I am very glad of it.”

   • 1866, Charles Reade, chapter VI, in Griffith Gaunt, or Jealousy, Boston: Ticknor and Fields, page 38, column 1:

     The rivals now were but rival nurses; and never did a lot of women make more fuss over a child than all these bloodthirsty men did over this Amazon manquée.

   • 1975, D. Hockney, W. Harper, B. Freed, Contemporary Research in Philosophical Logic and Linguistic Semantics, Springer,, →ISBN, page 78:

     The four possible combinations of values can be named Truth and Falsity (with capital initials) and truth-manqué and falsity-manqué (with lower-case initials).

   • 1988, Bernard Schwartz, The Unpublished Opinions of the Burger Court, Oxford University Press,, →ISBN, page 83:

     Roe v. Wade (1973): How a Legal Landmark Manqué Became a Constitutional Cause Célèbre

   • 1992, Irene Masing-Delic, Abolishing Death: A Salvation Myth of Russian Twentieth-Century Literature, Stanford University Press, →ISBN, page 78:

     Perhaps there was a feeling of moral triumph over a celebrated man, who was a noble man manqué because of his character flaws, whereas Fyodorov was a nobleman manqué for purely biological and social reasons, his illegitimacy.

   • 1994, C. Fred. Alford, Group Psychology and Political Theory, Yale University Press,, →ISBN, page 156:

     Over the course of several hundred years, the individual spread throughout Europe. So too, says Oakeshott, did the individual manqué, one who feared his freedom and sought to return to the comfort and order of communal life.

   • 1997, Harm Jan Habing, Henny J. G. L. M. Lamers, editors, Planetary Nebulae: Symposium No. 180, International Astronomical Union, Kluwer Academic Publishers, →ISBN, page 441:

     The H-HB and AGB-manqué stars of high metallicity (say Z>0.07) which are expected to be present albeit in small percentages in the stellar content of bulges and elliptical galaxies in general.

   • 1997, Isaac Levi, The Covenant of Reason: Rationality and the Commitments of Thought, Cambridge University Press, →ISBN, page 65:

     […] even with this charitable construal, the logic of consistency specifying what a rational agent ought to fully believe to be ideally consistent remains S5 and, hence, different from the S5-manqué logic of truth. […] Weakening the logic of consistency to S5-manqué while keeping the S5-manqué logic of truth intact is not workable.

   • 2023 November 5, Andrew Anthony, “Monsters of the road: what should the UK do about SUVs?”, in The Guardian‎^[1], →ISSN:

     But after the 1980s, such cars and their imitators – both off-road and off-road manqués – made increasing incursions into the urban market, a cramped environment in the UK of narrow streets with limited opportunities to hunt wild game.

Usage notes

• This adjective usually retains many grammatical features from French, used postpositively and taking the forms manquée when modifying a feminine noun, manqués for a plural noun, and manquées for a feminine plural noun; as such, it is consciously regarded as a French term amidst English ones, and so occurs disproportionately more often in French contexts.
• Like most words which are spelled with diacritics, manqué is sometimes written without its acute accent as manque.

Coordinate terms

• manqués (modifying plural), manquée (modifying feminine)

Derived terms

• meningocele manqué

Asturian

Verb

manqué

1. first-person singular indefinite preterite indicative of mancar

French

Pronunciation

• IPA^(key): /mɑ̃.ke/

• Audio:

  (file)

Participle

manqué (feminine manquée, masculine plural manqués, feminine plural manquées)

1. past participle of manquer

Adjective

manqué (feminine manquée, masculine plural manqués, feminine plural manquées)

1. missed; failed

   un acte manqué ― a Freudian slip

   une occasion manquée ― a missed opportunity

   un rendez-vous manqué ― (please add an English translation of this usage example)

   un garçon manqué ― a tomboy

   une fille manquée ― a tomgirl

Descendants

• → English: manqué

Further reading

• “manqué”, in Trésor de la langue française informatisé [Digitized Treasury of the French Language], 2012.

Spanish

Verb

manqué

1. first-person singular preterite indicative of mancar