Property law

The forty-second entry is la chaîne d’acquéreurs, and French has to name the parts because it has no single word for the thing. English does, and the word is « chain », used with the definite article and nothing after it. A seller who cannot move until a buyer has sold, and that buyer until somebody else has, makes a line of linked sales in which every purchase waits on the one behind it; an estate agent asks whether you are in a chain, and nobody needs it explained. From that bare noun a whole vocabulary has grown. A buyer with nothing to sell is « chain-free », and the word sells a flat faster than a new kitchen. When one link fails, the chain is said to « collapse » or to « break », and four households stop moving at once. French keeps la chaîne for anything made of links — la chaîne de montage, la chaîne du froid — and has to add d’acquéreurs to say which chain is meant. So the entry is a fair translation of an English idiom that carries a whole story in one syllable, and it works here only because the second half spells it out.