history - Why isnt connoisseur spelled connaisseur? - English . . . If you look in a French dictionary, the word connaisseur is indeed there My Hachette Dictionnaire de la Langue Française, for example, defines it very simply: connaisseur, euse a, n Expert en une chose The fact that this is not a word French people tend to use nowadays doesn’t mean they didn’t 300 years ago when it was borrowed into English