Cliché or Cliche: Is the Accent on the Last E Required?

The record on cliché is close to unanimous among dictionaries and the opposite among style guides.

Every dictionary headword in the table carries the é, all of them but Collins also list cliche, and the two style guides that rule on the word print it without the mark. AccentPad read each of these pages on 2026-10-24. Merriam-Webster, Cambridge and Collins's own site refused with HTTP 403, so they are not quoted; Collins appears through the British entry it supplies to Dictionary.com.

So if you are asking how to spell cliche, or how do you spell cliche in an essay or an email, either form is right. Keep the accent if your other French borrowings keep theirs, and drop it if you follow American government or Guardian style.

Why is cliche without the accent never misread?

Because English has no second word to confuse it with. Wiktionary's usage note says the spelling cliche can be used without confusion, as there is no other word in English with that spelling, and points to the contrast with résumé. Take the marks off résumé and you get resume, a verb that means to start again; take the mark off cliché and you get a string of letters that means nothing else.

The same fact lets the US Government Publishing Office treat the word as fully English. Its Style Manual, in rule 5.3, says diacritical marks are not used with anglicized words, and lists cliche among them alongside cafe, facade and naive. Rule 5.4 keeps them on foreign words, as an essential part of their spelling, and résumé, exposé and déjà vu sit in that second list.

The American Heritage Dictionary's guide puts numbers to it in its own way: "also" in an entry means the variant after it occurs less frequently than the first form, so its cli·ché also cli·che reads as "the accent is usual, the plain form is fine".

What does a printing plate have to do with cliché?

Everything, because the cliche origin is a print shop. The American Heritage Dictionary derives cliché from French clicher, to stereotype, and says the verb imitates the sound the matrix makes when it is dropped into molten metal to cast a stereotype plate.

Larousse is more cautious about that sound, calling the root perhaps onomatopoeic, for the sharp noise of the matrix, and defines clicher as pouring a metal alloy into the impression taken from a page of type.

Dictionary.com dates the English word to 1825–35 and still lists the printing sense under British usage: a stereotype or electrotype plate. Wiktionary traces clicher further back, to Old French cliquer, to click or clack, and relates it to Dutch klikken and German klicken. English click belongs to the same family. French printers still use the old sense: Larousse lists cliché monté, a typographic plate fixed on a block, and a photopolymer plate for flexography and dry offset.

The two words for a worn-out idea share a past. In the American Heritage Dictionary, a stereotype is still also a metal printing plate cast from a matrix, and the oversimplified conception came later. A printer's cliché turned out the same picture every time, which is what a cliché in a sentence does too.

Does a French cliché mean the same thing as an English one?

Only in one of its senses. Larousse lists five, and the English meaning, a commonplace said over and over in the same terms, is the third. The first is a photographic negative used to print proofs; the second, marked as old use, is any photograph, as in showing your holiday clichés. The fourth and fifth are the printer's plates.

Wiktionary gives the same spread and the phrase prendre un cliché, to take a snapshot. A French speaker who shows you a cliché of the Eiffel Tower may be showing a photo, not a hackneyed view. In French the accent is not optional: Wiktionary transcribes the word /kli.ʃe/, and the é carries that final vowel.

Other languages borrowed the word and respelled it for their own alphabets. Wiktionary's translations include German Klischee, Portuguese clichê with a circumflex, and Swedish kliché, while Dutch, Italian and Spanish kept cliché unchanged.

Is it correct to call something cliché, or only clichéd?

Clichéd is the safe adjective; cliché used as one divides opinion. The American Heritage Dictionary labels the adjective use a usage problem, and its usage note says it goes back to the 1950s. In 2011, 79% of its Usage Panel rejected the sentence "It would sound very cliché to say he died as he lived, helping people", while about a fifth found it somewhat or completely acceptable.

The note explains the pull of the shorter form: English already borrowed some é-final adjectives from French participles, such as passé and recherché. But cliché arrived as a noun, so the adjective was made by adding -d, as in barefaced and fated. Dictionary.com is more relaxed and lists trite, hackneyed and clichéd as an adjective sense of cliché itself.

In compounds there is no dispute. The usage note calls cliché-ridden, full of clichés, perfectly acceptable, and the Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary gives a cliché-ridden style as an example.

Which syllable of cliché takes the stress?

The stress of cliché depends on which side of the Atlantic you are on. The Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary gives /ˈkliːʃeɪ/ for British English, stressed at the start, and /kliːˈʃeɪ/ for American English, stressed at the end. Wiktionary agrees, and Collins, on Dictionary.com, gives the British form alone.

Dictionary.com's American respelling is klee-shay, with kli- as another first syllable. None of the sources gives the final e a silent reading; the é is always said as ay. That is the one thing the accent tells an English reader, and cliche without it is pronounced the same. The e with accent page has é and É for every keyboard if you want the mark anyway.