50 Fun Facts About French Language

Members of the Académie française, which has policed French since Cardinal Richelieu's day, carry what nickname?

The Immortals, les immortels, take the name from the Académie's motto À l'immortalité, and each of the forty holds a numbered seat for life, wearing the green-embroidered habit vert at ceremonies.

A French speaker saying quatre-vingts for 80 is literally saying what, a relic of an older counting system?

Four twenties is the literal reading, a trace of a vigesimal, base-20, system: 70 is soixante-dix, 'sixty-ten', and 99 comes out as quatre-vingt-dix-neuf, 'four-twenties-ten-nine'.

In which country do some French speakers say huitante for 80, where France says quatre-vingts?

Switzerland is split on the matter: Geneva, Neuchâtel and Jura keep quatre-vingts, while Vaud, Valais and Fribourg count huitante, and the whole French-speaking part of the country says septante and nonante.

The distress call mayday, coined at Croydon Airport in the early 1920s, is the French for what?

Help me is m'aider: radio officer Frederick Stanley Mockford chose it because so much of Croydon's traffic flew to Le Bourget in Paris, and the fuller phrase is venez m'aider.

The circumflex on words such as hôpital, forêt and île marks the loss of which letter from older French?

S is the vanished letter: the circumflex marks a lost sound, so tête was once teste and château was chastel, while the English cousins hospital, forest and isle still carry the s.

In France, a librairie is a classic false friend for English speakers; what kind of place is it actually?

A bookshop is a librairie, while the library is the bibliothèque; the bookseller sense took over in the 16th century and pushed out the older meaning that English kept.

What do French concert audiences shout for a repeat, since encore, the word English borrowed, is not what they say?

Bis, 'a second time', is the Paris cry, or else une autre or un rappel; encore just means 'again' in French, and Italian audiences shout bis too.

Quebec's red octagonal road signs read arrêt; which single word do the same signs carry across France itself?

Stop is what France's signs say, and Quebec's language office ruled it a valid French word attested since 1927, so the old arrêt/stop pairing on one sign is now deprecated as redundant.

Which Scrabble champion won the 2015 French world title after nine weeks with a French dictionary, speaking no French?

Nigel Richards, a New Zealander, memorised the French lexicon and took the non-duplicate event in Belgium; in the duplicate event he finished second by a single point.

The English word mortgage comes from a Law French term of the Middle Ages; what does it literally mean?

A death pledge is the literal sense: the pledge 'dies' either when the debt is paid off or when the property is taken through foreclosure, and mort is still the French for dead.

In French, matinée, which English uses for an afternoon show, actually means which part of the day?

The morning, from matin plus the suffix -ée marking a stretch of time, is the French sense, so bonne matinée wishes you a good one and a grasse matinée is a lie-in.

In a French restaurant an entrée is which course, the opposite of what the word means in the United States?

The starter is the entrée in France and most of the English-speaking world, a small dish before the plat principal; only in the United States and parts of Canada did it drift to mean the main course.

A French pharmacist's préservatif, a notorious false friend for English speakers, is what?

A condom is a préservatif, and asking a French grocer for food without préservatifs is a running joke; the additive English speakers mean is a conservateur.

The French adverb actuellement is a false friend: rather than 'actually', what does it normally mean?

Currently is the meaning, so 'il est actuellement à Paris' places someone there right now; for 'actually' a French speaker reaches for en fait or vraiment.

The French verb blesser looks like a blessing to English eyes, but to blesser someone is to do what to them?

To wound is the meaning, and a blessure is an injury; the French for to bless is bénir, the root of bénédiction.

A tourist in France who tries to book a room at the hôtel de ville has mistaken a hotel for what?

The town hall is the hôtel de ville, and the trap runs deeper: an hôtel particulier is a grand private house and a maître d'hôtel runs a dining room, since hôtel once meant any large building.

What single word do French dancers and actors say to wish each other luck, 'break a leg' not being their custom?

Merde is the backstage blessing, on the theory that wishing good luck outright invites bad; English-speaking theatre folk have borrowed it and sometimes say both.

The stage-Frenchman's oath sacrebleu is a minced form of which phrase, with bleu swapped in for the rhyme?

Sacré Dieu, 'holy God', broke a commandment against taking the Lord's name in vain, so bleu stood in for Dieu, as it does in morbleu and corbleu; real French people hardly ever say it.

A French sweetheart addressed as mon petit chou is being likened, affectionately, to which vegetable?

A cabbage is a chou, and the same word names the puffs of choux pastry; as an adjective chou means cute, and the feminine pet form is choute.

To poser un lapin, which translates word for word as 'to put down a rabbit', is French for doing what to someone?

Standing them up is the sense: il m'a posé un lapin means he never showed, and the phrase is informal enough for any café conversation about a no-show date.

A French speaker who tombe dans les pommes, literally 'falls in the apples', has just done what?

Fainted is the meaning, a keel-over into the apples rather than a romance; the informal phrase sits beside the plainer s'évanouir, and nobody is sure why apples.

Quand les poules auront des dents, the French way of saying 'when pigs fly', imagines hens growing what?

Teeth on a hen is the impossibility the French chose, where English sends pigs into the air; both are adynata, figures that promise something at a time that will never come.

A French speaker who 'has le cafard' is feeling blue; as a plain noun, cafard names which household pest?

A cockroach is a cafard, and the gloomy sense goes back to Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du mal of 1857; the word can also mean a hypocrite or a tattletale.

The French mock clumsy French as speaking it comme une vache espagnole, that is, like which animal from Spain?

A cow from Spain is the insult, and nobody knows why: one theory reads vache as a corruption of basque, since Basques were once mocked for their French, though the evidence is thin.

A French speaker with d'autres chats à fouetter has 'cats to whip'; what does the English equivalent have instead?

Fish to fry, as in 'other fish to fry', is the English match for whipping cats, and the Dutch borrowed the French image wholesale as andere katten te geselen hebben.

RSVP on an English invitation abbreviates the French répondez s'il vous plaît, which word for word means what?

Respond if it pleases you is the literal reading, since s'il vous plaît is 'if it pleases you'; the French themselves shorten the please to SVP on notes and signs.

The French word aujourd'hui is a pile-up of au, jour, de and hui that, taken apart, literally means what?

On the day of today is the literal sense, because hui, from the old Roman hodie, already meant 'today' on its own before speakers padded it; some even say au jour d'aujourd'hui.

The French word for a bra, soutien-gorge, literally promises support for which part of the body?

The throat is the gorge, an old euphemism for the bosom, while the English brassiere comes from a French word for a short garment covering the arms, which the French never use for the item.

The word denim is a worn-down contraction of a French phrase for a serge cloth from which southern city?

Nîmes gave the world serge de Nîmes, and denim as we know it was first produced there; the city is better known to tourists for its Roman arena.

The English word curfew descends from the Old French couvre-feu, a medieval evening order to do what?

Cover the fire was the command, rung on a bell each evening so that hearths were banked and medieval towns of timber did not burn down in the night.

A chauffeur was originally the man who did what to a French motor car of the 1890s before it would start?

Heat its engine with a Bunsen burner: the Daimler hot-tube ignitors on early French cars had to be warmed before they would spark, and chauffer means 'to heat'.

The word sabotage comes from the sabots worn by French labourers in 19th-century disputes; what exactly were sabots?

Wooden shoes called sabots were the workers' footwear, and the tale that they were hurled into machinery to jam it is a popular but incorrect account of how the word arose.

The word cliché began as 19th-century French jargon in which trade, before it came to mean a worn-out phrase?

Printing gave us cliché around 1825, from clicher, 'to click', supposedly the sound of a block being dabbed into molten type-metal to cast a stereotype, itself another printers' word.

Cul-de-sac means 'bottom of the sack', but which word does a street sign in France more often use for a dead end?

Impasse, or voie sans issue, is what the sign says, while cul-de-sac survives in French mainly as an older term; the 'arse of the sack' reading is a folk etymology, since cul meant bottom.

The French noun œil, meaning eye, takes which famously irregular plural, one that no rule about adding an s predicts?

Yeux is the plural, a separate line of descent from the Vulgar oclus that gave œil its singular, which is why a wink is un clin d'œil but two eyes are deux yeux.

Which French verb means to address someone with the familiar second-person pronoun rather than the polite one?

Tutoyer is the verb, built on tu plus -oyer with a euphonic t, and its opposite vouvoyer covers the polite form; English once had the same pair in 'to thou' and 'to you'.

The cédille hooked under the ç of français takes its name from a word for 'little z' in which language?

Spanish named it, as the diminutive of ceda, the old name of the letter zeta, and then dropped the mark itself; French kept it to make c soft before a, o and u, as in garçon.

French schoolchildren learn the ligature œ of cœur and bœuf by which nickname, a pun sounding like 'eggs in water'?

E dans l'o, 'e in the o', sounds like des œufs dans l'eau, and unlike the fi or fl of typesetting it is a true linguistic ligature; Canadian officialdom prefers o-e liés.

Which city, Lingala in its streets but French in its offices, is the world's largest French-speaking urban area?

Kinshasa outranks Paris on that nominal measure, and its country, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, is why the number of French speakers is growing fastest in Africa rather than in Europe.

Which country's 1987 constitution made the French-based creole nearly everyone speaks co-official with French itself?

Haiti names both languages in its constitution but recognises the creole as the only one all Haitians share; French remains the language of schooling and officialdom for a minority.

Which Canadian province is the only one officially bilingual in English and French under the Charter of Rights?

New Brunswick went bilingual under Premier Louis Robichaud's 1969 Official Languages Act, the same year Ottawa passed its own, and a third of its people speak French at home.

Which microstate dropped Italian as its official language in 1860 and replaced it with French, which it still uses?

Monaco switched when France absorbed the neighbouring County of Nice, and its own Monégasque, a Ligurian dialect, is taught in schools and printed on some street signs without being official.

Joual, the name for Quebec's working-class French, is simply a local pronunciation of which standard French word?

Cheval, 'horse', comes out as joual in that accent, and the label was pinned on the dialect in the 1960s as an insult before Michel Tremblay's plays made it a badge of identity.

Which word for email does Quebec favour over the anglicism 'email' commonly heard in France?

Courriel was coined in French-speaking Canada around 1994, and Quebec built pourriel for spam on top of it, blending poubelle, 'rubbish bin', with the new word and a hint of pourri, 'rotten'.

Francis I's 1539 Ordinance of Villers-Cotterêts made French compulsory in legal documents in place of which language?

Latin lost its grip on the courts with that ordinance, the oldest French legislation still partly in force, though it lingered in church registers in some regions for long afterwards.

Which French word for computer did Jacques Perret coin for IBM France in 1955, calculateur being too narrow?

Ordinateur was Perret's answer in a letter of 16 April 1955, reviving an old word for one who sets things in order, and the French have never adopted 'computer' since.

Who in 1980 became the first woman elected to the Académie française, nearly 350 years after its founding?

Marguerite Yourcenar, author of Memoirs of Hadrian, broke the all-male run while living on an island in Maine, having taken United States citizenship decades earlier.

Work on the ninth edition of the Académie française's dictionary began in 1986; in which year was it finally completed?

2024 saw the last volume published, 38 years after the work started and 330 years after the first edition was presented to Louis XIV, and the whole thing is now free to read online.

Which autonomous region of Italy adopted French as its sole official language in 1536, three years before France itself?

Aosta Valley beat the Ordinance of Villers-Cotterêts to it, and since 1946 Italian and French have shared official status there, with the local Franco-Provençal dialect recognised too.

Which 1994 French law, nicknamed for the culture minister who proposed it, requires French in adverts and workplaces?

Toubon Law is the everyday name of law 94-665, and Jacques Toubon's critics promptly rechristened it the loi Allgood, translating his surname into the English he was trying to keep out.