Fiancé" vs "Fiancée: Who's Who?

The extra "e" should indicate the feminine form of the noun, as in French where the word comes from. However, the male form is less often used, and so people mistakenly think "fiancée" is a gender-neutral term. It's the same with "blond" and "blonde", which are also gendered terms, but often used for the other gender anyway. As with any other common grammatical error, everyone will know what you mean, but some people will silently judge you.

Most American English speakers don't know the difference and would use either interchangeably, with the one e being more common. In French, from which the phrase is borrowed, it is strictly gendered, in the way you said. Personally even knowing the root I'd probably just say "fiancé" in either case because a) who cares and b) I don't like pointlessly gendered language.

I didn't even know Fiancée was a word in English lol, I use fiance for both

Fiancé is the man, Fiancée is the woman Pronounced the same

A lot of people just plain don’t know and use whatever they decide to type. You have it right.

One e is the man, two e for the woman. I found a way to remember it very recently. The word "nee" ("born as" in French) which is used in English to denote a womans maiden name also has a male equivalent "ne". It's the same rules for that word, and I know nee is for the woman as you see it a lot more than ne.

Classic rules rule!

Your initial belief was correct. The extra e indicates the feminine form. This also holds true for names like René and Renée, although in the English speaking world only the female version is commonly heard.

Please understand that many English speakers have fairly weak literacy, and likely don't know there's a difference.

No one can keep it straight so I wouldn’t worry tbh

There are two words "alumnus" and alumna" for male and female graduates, respectively . "Alumna" is almost never seen today, with "alumnus" being used indiscriminately for both genders. Curiously, the male plural "alumni" is increasingly an all-purpose word for male, female, singular, or plural. (Auto-Correct tried to change alumnus to alumni right in this post!) Reason: Americans don't understand grammatical gender or Latin case endings.

Ok welcome to French lessons Your fiancé is a man, but your fiancée is a woman. Because this is a loanword, English speakers generally have no reason to make the distinction. English isn’t a gendered language so we’re simply unaccustomed to changing the spelling for each gender. Many people learn one spelling and use it in all cases. In French, nouns are gendered. Feminine nouns and women’s titles most commonly end in e. In keeping with the way that particular language is gendered, fiancé (m) becomes fiancée(f). The extra e tells them it’s a woman. You can use either spelling and most English speakers will be none the wiser. But now you know. Properly speaking, a man is a fiancé and a woman is a fiancée.

For those who didn’t know there was a difference, have a look in a card shop. The fiancé cards are generally designed for men!

This is… dialectical in English at first guess. fiancé is, I’m aware, technically a male term and fiancée is technically a female term. But I’ve seen both used interchangeably and it seems that the shorter version is more common. The technicality only applies to French and since this term is anglicized the extra e is linguistically doing nothing. TL;DR: this only really matters if you care about French, since you’re learning English you probably don’t so it’s not that important.

Honestly, I use fiance for everyone. It was way later in life that I learned there's a difference, so the habit stuck, and plenty of people do the same.

I never really noticed they were different and I don’t care to differentiate them 😅, same for widow and divorcee or whatever. The gender differentiation is not something I care about and isn’t largely relevant to my life. Feel free to be as meticulous as you wish on the matter but I doubt you’ll be picked apart. (Know your audience)

What you thought, was and still is correct. If you see it any other way, it’s likely just because the author doesn’t know of the difference.

Commonly, at least in america, fiance is spelled without the accents (which is probably better because we often say fiànce) and spell it the same whether they are men and woman. There are a few words in English that for some reason followed french noun gender via their spelling conventions, but since no one cares about that, many many people both don't know the difference or don't remember which is which, and end up using one for everything. examples fiance blonde protege brunette so, you are correct about the spelling tradition, but it seems like a tradition that will end because of popular usage.

many english speakers do not know french grammatical rules. same with blonde being used for men instead of blond

There are exactly zero contexts where this distinction matters in english and that is why you’ll never see fiancée in the US. The person to whom you are engaged is your fiancé. Using Fiancée in the states is pure pedantry.

You're better-versed on this than most native speakers 😆

To add to other answers: English simply does not, overall, use different spelling depending on the gender of a person. We use different *words,* and different affixes (like *-ess*), but these changes are pronounced, and are reflected in their spelling. Overall, there are very few words that still customarily follow French spelling rules, so for many people it does not seem like a spelling error; it's not intuitive. Changing the spelling of *fiancé, blond,* etc. was purely done in the past because these words were foreign french words, as foreign as *je ne sais quoi* sounds to us now. Over time, these words have become natural words in English, and the spelling conventions have become less recognized in many cases---especially casually. We see the general spelling of *brunette* is well favored over *brunet* in all instances, for example, and we also see the accent marks increasingly being removed to create *fiance* and *fiancee*.

Gendered loan words, especially ones from French, often have their gendered spelling changes applied inconsistently. There’s the same issue with blond/blonde and perfume/parfum. Make sure to know them when writing formally and in other circumstances nobody cares.