tête-bêche
AI In plain words
Writing a short explanation…
Written by a house AI from the entry below, in your language. The entry itself is the source.
tête-bêche
- /tɛtˈbɛʃ/
Rhymes with -ɛʃ
Where it comes from
From French tête-bêche (literally “head-to-foot”).
adjective
- Of a postage stamp, printed upside down relative to the following stamp of the same row or column. Liu himself is a professional stamp collector, and in 1972 he bought a tête-bêche pair of Qing dynasty stamps from an auction in London.
noun tête-bêches
- A book where two texts are bound together, with one text rotated 180° relative to the other, such that when one text runs head-to-tail, the other runs tail-to-head. It's an odd little confection, the tête-bêche, but it's oddly pleasing. Each author gets a fair crack of the whip, with their own cover and top-billing, and the illusion of two separate books makes a head-to-tail volume seem somehow to be good value.
Talk about this word "tête-bêche." Wiktionary, via Micwyn, micwyn.com/word/t%C3%AAte-b%C3%AAche. Accessed 6 Nov. 2026. tête-bêche. (n.d.). In Wiktionary, via Micwyn. Retrieved November 6, 2026, from https://micwyn.com/word/t%C3%AAte-b%C3%AAche "tête-bêche." Wiktionary, via Micwyn. Accessed November 6, 2026. https://micwyn.com/word/t%C3%AAte-b%C3%AAche.Cite this
@misc{te_te_be_che_2026,
title = {tête-bêche},
howpublished = {Wiktionary, via Micwyn},
year = {2026},
url = {https://micwyn.com/word/t%C3%AAte-b%C3%AAche},
urldate = {2026-11-06}
}
