Des éboueurs retrouvent un ticket de loterie gagnant

What does “faire une boulette” mean in French?

Une boulette is a little ball of something: a meatball, a ball of bread, a wad of paper. In informal French it is also a blunder. Faire une boulette is to mess up in a small, avoidable, faintly embarrassing way — the sort of mistake you wince at rather than one that ruins a life. And se rendre compte de la boulette is the moment you realise what you have just done.

The mistake sense has been around since the early nineteenth century; the usual story involves the paper pellets of an inattentive schoolboy, though that is a story rather than a documented origin. The register is casual — fine among friends and on television, not in a formal report. Near neighbours: une gaffe, une bourde, un impair. In this news item a woman bins a lottery ticket marked “non payable”, assuming she has lost — then realises it was worth a million euros.