courtes

Courtes is a form found in French grammar, specifically the feminine plural adjective form of court, meaning short or brief. It is used to describe feminine plural nouns, as in robes courtes (short dresses) or périodes courtes (brief periods). The corresponding masculine forms are court (singular) and courts (plural), while the feminine singular is courte. Because courtes is an inflected adjective rather than a standalone noun, its meaning derives from the noun it modifies and it does not function as an independent term in modern French.

In usage, courtes follows the standard rules of agreement: it appears after the noun in most descriptive phrases, though adjectives can sometimes appear before the noun for stylistic emphasis. The form courtes reflects standard noun–adjective agreement in gender and number, and it changes to courtes only when the accompanying noun is feminine and plural.

Outside of ordinary grammar, courtes may appear in proper nouns (for example, as part of a place name or family surname) and would then be capitalized, treated as a name rather than a descriptor. Such uses are not common and are highly specific to a given context. There is no widely recognized concept, organization, or subject universally identified simply as “Courtes” in English-language reference works; when encountered as a term, it is typically understood as a grammatical form or as part of a larger proper noun.