Due to simple confusion, few people know how to correctly write this word, which is widely used in the professional field.
Many people make mistakes without knowing it, simply because certain words are confusing. Between homophones, these words that sound the same but are written differently, and similar expressions with letters or accents that change, there are numerous pitfalls in the French language. For example, different from dispute or access and excess: a simple letter changes the meaning. Not to mention grammatical confusions, like ce and se, which seem obvious until most young people mix them up. These are small errors, but they are easy to make when writing on a daily basis.
There is one in particular that tends to interfere in the professional environment, specifically among people who create a business by bringing a project to life. The word in question is “entrepreneurship,” as many would spontaneously write it. However, this spelling is incorrect. Indeed, the right word is: “entrepreneurship”. If most people make this mistake, it is because they are generally confused with the term “partnership”, but the word “entrepreneurship” does not exist.
The French Academy also emphasizes this on its site: the name entrepreneurship “we must neither pronounce nor write “entrepreneurship””. Furthermore, the rule also applies to another term close to the latter, namely “entrepreneurial”. As the institution specifies, there are some rarer words in -eur, “whose adjectival derivative is in -eural. This is the case of seigneurial, but also of entrepreneurial.” They should not be confused with words in -ary, such as notary, which give adjectives in -arial, such as notarial. So, we will also avoid saying or writing entrepreneurial.
