France’s language police have issued a decree that seeks to ban the words “fake news” from French, but its proposed Gallic alternative - "information fallacieuse" - is so unwieldy it is unlikely to catch on.

The Commission for the Enrichment of the French Language (CELF) has helpfully offered another possibility for French speakers who want to avoid Anglicisms - “infox.”

The shorter term is a combination of “infos” - an abbreviation of “informations” which means news - and “intox,” which is an informal word for disinformation or a hoax.

"Information fallacieuse" simply means “fallacious information.”

"The Anglo-Saxon expression 'fake news', which refers to a range of behaviour contributing to the misinformation of the public, has rapidly prospered in French," the commission lamented.

"This is an occasion to draw on the resources of the language to find French equivalents," said the CELF in a recommendation published in the French government's official gazette, the Journal Officiel.

The CELF is an offshoot of the august Académie Française, a four-century-old institution whose job is to defend the purity of the French language.