100 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, adopted for aircraft in the 1920s, is generally traced to the French for what?

Help me is m'aider, short for venez m'aider; by the usual account Croydon radio officer Frederick Mockford picked it because so much of his traffic flew to Le Bourget in Paris.

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 one French cry, alongside une autre; 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 own language office accepts it as a French word, so signs that paired arrêt with stop were judged redundant.

Which Scrabble champion won a 2015 French-language world title after reportedly memorising the dictionary in nine weeks, speaking no French?

Nigel Richards, a New Zealander, went on to beat a French-speaking finalist from Gabon in Belgium, in a game played in a language he could not hold a conversation in.

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 the likeness is a coincidence: blesser goes back to an old word for bruising, while English bless began as marking with blood.

A tourist in France who tries to book a room at the hôtel de ville is actually standing in 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 long meant a mansion as well as an inn.

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 usually explained as a minced form of which phrase, bleu standing in for the rhyme?

Sacré Dieu, 'holy God', took the Lord's name in vain, so bleu stood in for Dieu, as it does in morbleu and corbleu; French dictionaries now mark the oath as dated.

A French sweetheart addressed as mon petit chou is, word for word, 'my little' 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 today, but in the late 19th century to poser un lapin meant leaving without paying, at first a woman for her company.

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

Fainted is the meaning, and nobody is sure why apples: one guess points to George Sand, who wrote of being 'dans les pommes cuites', in the stewed apples, when worn out.

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, though English has the same bird in 'as scarce as hen's teeth'.

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

A cockroach is a cafard, a name probably borrowed from an older insult for a sanctimonious hypocrite, dark-robed and shy of the light; the gloomy sense first shows up in Baudelaire in 1857.

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: the best-known theory hears a garbled 'comme un Basque espagnol', like a Basque from Spain, but no early text records that version.

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, and French whips the same animal to shrug things off: 'pas de quoi fouetter un chat' means it's no big deal.

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.

Aujourd'hui is a pile-up of au, jour, de and hui that 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, borrows the everyday French word for which part of the body?

The throat is the everyday meaning of gorge, which was also an old word for the bosom, while brassière, which gave English its word, means a baby's vest in France.

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 jeans tell the same kind of story: the word goes back to the Old French name for Genoa, another cloth-making city.

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 an early motor car?

Heat its engine: chauffeur literally means stoker, from chauffer, 'to heat', a nickname the French gave early motorists when the first cars ran on steam.

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 is what the sign says, and Voltaire is credited with the word: in a 1761 letter he asked for it in place of cul-de-sac, which he found too crude for a street.

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

Yeux is the plural, worn down from the old Roman plural oculos as œil was from the singular, and compounds break the rule again: bull's-eye windows are œils-de-bœuf.

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, and its opposite vouvoyer covers the polite form; English once had a matching verb, to thou, for addressing someone that way.

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 the letter is a true linguistic ligature, part of the spelling itself.

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

Kinshasa has outgrown Paris, and until 1966 it was Léopoldville, named by Henry Morton Stanley for Belgium's king before Mobutu's government renamed it after a local village.

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

Haiti's constitution says 'all Haitians are united by a common language: Creole' before naming Creole and French as the republic's two official languages.

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

New Brunswick owes its two official languages to its Acadians: about a third of its people are French-speaking, and Louis Robichaud, an Acadian premier, made the languages equal by law in 1969.

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 a local pronunciation of which standard French animal name?

Cheval, 'horse', comes out as joual in that accent, and the label began around 1960 as a put-down before Michel Tremblay's 1968 play Les Belles-sœurs put the dialect on stage.

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

Courriel squeezes courrier électronique into one word, and Quebec's language office built pourriel for spam on top of it, from poubelle, 'rubbish bin'.

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, and its two articles on language have never been repealed, which makes it the oldest French legislation still in force.

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 puts things in order, though he went on to suggest the feminine ordinatrice électronique.

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.

In 1694 the Académie française presented the first edition of its dictionary to which king?

Louis XIV received it after a wait so long that Antoine Furetière, a member, compiled a rival dictionary and was expelled for it; the ninth edition, begun in 1986, was finished only in 2024.

Which autonomous region of Italy began keeping its official records in French in 1536, three years before France itself?

Aosta Valley's French later came under attack from Mussolini's regime, which Italianised the names of its towns, briefly turning Courmayeur into Cormaiore.

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 it arrived weakened: before it took effect the Constitutional Council ruled that the state could not dictate vocabulary to private citizens.

Which 1990 comedy reached French cinemas as 'Maman, j'ai raté l'avion', or 'Mum, I missed the plane'?

Home Alone became a line of dialogue in France, and its sequel kept the joke going as 'Maman, j'ai encore raté l'avion', with 'encore' meaning 'again'.

Potpourri, the bowl of dried petals that scents a room, takes its name from a French phrase meaning what?

Rotten pot is the literal meaning: 'pourri' means rotten, and in French the name also belongs to a stew made from a wide variety of ingredients.

In the French editions of Harry Potter, which bakery word names the wand that chooses each wizard?

Baguette means wand in French, so a 'baguette magique' is a magic one; the word was first recorded as a kind of bread only in 1920.

The éclair, a finger of choux pastry filled with cream, has a French name meaning what?

Flash of lightning is the meaning, perhaps because the pastry is eaten in a flash, though some credit the gleam of its icing instead.

The line 'Let them eat cake', long pinned on Marie Antoinette, names which bread in the original French?

Brioche, a bread enriched with butter and eggs, is what the French phrase offers. Rousseau wrote the story down when Marie Antoinette was nine and had never been to France.

Which 2009 comedy was released in France under a different English title, 'Very Bad Trip'?

The Hangover became 'Very Bad Trip' for French audiences, while Quebec cinemas showed it under a real translation, 'Lendemain de veille'.

Papier-mâché, the craft of moulding masks from pulp, has a French name that literally means what?

Chewed paper is the literal meaning, a fair picture of the method: waste sheets are shredded and soaked with a binder. The technique itself has roots in ancient China.

Charles de Gaulle asked how anyone could govern a country with 246 varieties of 'fromage', meaning what?

Cheese is 'fromage', a word once spelled 'formage' that goes back to the mould each one was shaped in.

English roosters crow cock-a-doodle-doo, but which cry do roosters give in French children's books?

Cocorico is the French rooster's song, and because the bird is a national emblem, the word also serves as a patriotic cry of victory.

Which US state, once an independent republic, has a name coined from the French for 'green mountain'?

Vermont translates the Green Mountains that bisect the state. The name was adopted in 1777, replacing New Connecticut.

Déjà vu, the eerie feeling of having lived a moment before, is a French phrase meaning what?

Already seen is the literal meaning. Its opposite is 'jamais vu', 'never seen': the sense that a familiar situation is being met for the first time.

Mardi Gras, the carnival that fills New Orleans with parades before Lent, has a French name meaning what?

Fat Tuesday is the translation: it was the last day for eating rich, fatty foods, red meat above all, before the weeks of fasting began.

The Tour de France leader wears the 'maillot jaune', a jersey of which colour?

Yellow may echo the newsprint of L'Auto, the daily that organised the race; a rival story says it was an unpopular shade and so the only one available at short notice.

Film noir, Nino Frank's label for shadowy Hollywood crime dramas, uses the French for which colour?

Black is the literal meaning of noir, though 'dark film' is closer in spirit. The critic first applied the label in 1946, and most Hollywood professionals of the era did not recognise the term.

A shopper in a French market who asks for 'raisins' is handed which fresh fruit?

Grapes are 'raisins' in French, fresh from the vine. The dried kind need an extra word: they are 'raisins secs', used mostly in baking.

Which vegetable do French speakers call a 'pomme de terre', literally an 'apple of the earth'?

Potato is the answer, and the same picture turns up next door: Dutch says 'aardappel' and Austrian German 'Erdapfel', both meaning earth apple.

Which day of the week is 'vendredi', named in French for Venus, the Roman goddess of love?

Friday is vendredi, the day of Venus. English kept the idea but swapped in the Germanic goddess Frigg, long paired with her Roman counterpart.

Eurovision's top score is famously announced as 'douze points'; which number is 'douze' in French?

Twelve is douze, the top mark on the Eurovision scale, which skips two numbers on the way up: 1 to 8 points, then 10, then 12.

French children post their December letters to 'Père Noël', whose name literally means what?

Father Christmas is the translation. Since 1962 the French post office has run a secretariat that opens his mail and sends each child a free reply.

Descartes first published his most famous line in French: 'Je pense, donc je suis', meaning what?

I think, therefore I am first appeared in the 1637 Discourse on the Method, which Descartes wrote in French rather than the scholarly tongue of his day to reach a wider audience.

A faux pas, an embarrassing social blunder in English, is a French phrase that literally means what?

False step is the literal meaning, and French speakers also use the phrase for a real stumble or misstep, not only for a social one.

English praises an elusive charm as a 'je ne sais quoi', a French phrase that word for word means what?

'I don't know what' is the word-for-word meaning, and the French use it the same way, as a noun for a certain something that defies description.

British shoppers stand in a queue, a word borrowed from the French for which part of an animal?

Tail is the meaning. Before it described a line of waiting people, English used queue for a braid of hair hanging down the back of the head.

The heir to the French throne was styled the Dauphin, a title that is also French for which sea animal?

Dolphin is the meaning. A 12th-century count of Albon bore Dauphin as a second name, his heirs made it their title, and it passed to the French crown with their lands in 1349.

The Papillon, a toy spaniel with large upright ears, is named with the French word for which insect?

Butterfly is the meaning, a nod to the breed's erect ears. Dogs of the same type whose ears hang down are called Phalène, the French for moth.

Baton Rouge, Louisiana's state capital on the Mississippi, has a French name that means what?

Red stick is the meaning: French explorers found a tall pole painted red, which marked the boundary between the hunting grounds of two tribes.

Edward III founded which order of chivalry, whose French motto is 'Honi soit qui mal y pense'?

The Garter is the most senior order of knighthood in the British honours system. Its motto, a rebuke to anyone who sees evil in it, is a retort that legend gives to the king himself.

Which breakfast citrus fruit do the French call a 'pamplemousse', a word borrowed from Dutch?

Grapefruit is the everyday meaning, though careful French writers reserve pamplemousse for the pomelo and call its hybrid offspring a 'pomélo'.

Which country do French speakers call Allemagne, a name taken from the ancient Alamanni tribe?

Germany is Allemagne because the Alamanni were the Germanic people the French faced first; Finnish, by the same logic, names the country after the Saxons.

Which mark, the two dots in Noël and Citroën, tells a French reader to sound the vowel separately?

Tréma is the French name, taken from a Greek word for a perforation or the pip on a die, so it describes the look of the mark rather than its job.

Which invasion of 1066 made a dialect of French the language of England's ruling class?

The Norman Conquest put French speakers in charge, and English later gained pairs such as mutton and sheep, veal and calf: French-derived for the meat, native for the animal.

French, Italian and Romanian belong to which language family, spread by an ancient empire's soldiers?

Romance is the family, a label that comes from 'romanice', meaning 'in Roman': the everyday speech of ordinary people, as opposed to the formal written language of scholars.

Robespierre helped popularise France's motto, which pairs 'liberté' and 'égalité' with which third word?

Fraternité completes the trio, yet the phrase was only one revolutionary slogan among several and did not become the official motto until the Third Republic, a century later.

French is often called 'the language of' which playwright, the author of Tartuffe and The Miser?

Molière is the writer whose name stands for the language itself. He acted too, and collapsed on stage while playing a hypochondriac in his final play, dying a few hours later.

The English name for the letter W treats it as two U's; what do French speakers call the same letter?

Double V is the French name, 'double vé'. The letter is a rare visitor in French, used mostly in foreign names and borrowed words such as wagon and week-end.

Which accent do French speakers call the 'accent aigu', the mark on the last letter of café and fiancé?

Acute is the accent, placed over the letter e in French to set its clear, closed sound apart from the weak e heard in 'le'.

Which letter is silent at the start of French words, even in the kind that grammar books call 'aspirated'?

H is silent in French, and 'aspirated' only recalls how it sounded centuries ago. An aspirated one does keep words apart, though: it is 'le hibou', the owl, never 'l'hibou'.

French typists use which keyboard layout, named like QWERTY for the first six letters of its top row?

AZERTY appeared in France in the 1890s as a variation on American typewriter keyboards, and Belgium uses it too, with its own national arrangement of the keys.

In Belgium, French speakers say 'septante' where France says 'soixante-dix'; which number do both mean?

Both mean 70, and septante is the older habit: it was common in France itself until around the 16th century, when 'soixante-dix', literally sixty-ten, began to win out.

Which geometric shape do French speakers use as an everyday nickname for mainland France?

The Hexagon is the nickname, for the six rough sides of the mainland. The image first appeared in French geography textbooks of the 1850s.

A French guest who turns up at a gala wearing 'un smoking' is dressed in which formal outfit?

A tuxedo is 'un smoking' in French, a pseudo-English word clipped from 'smoking jacket' that no English speaker would use for the suit.

French maps label the English Channel 'La Manche', a name usually said to picture which part of a shirt?

The sleeve is the usual explanation, a nod to the shape of the Channel on a map. The French name has been in use since at least the 17th century.

In south-west France and Quebec, which name replaces 'pain au chocolat' for the breakfast pastry?

Chocolatine is the word across south-western France and in Quebec, while Belgians ask for a 'couque au chocolat' and the pastry's standard name literally means chocolate bread.

Which French slang, named by flipping the syllables of 'l'envers', turns 'femme' into 'meuf'?

Verlan is the inverse of 'l'envers', which itself means back-to-front. Some of its coinages, meuf among them, are now common enough to appear in standard dictionaries.

Medieval France's langue d'oïl and langue d'oc were two speech zones named for their words for what?

Yes was 'oïl' in the north and 'oc' in the south, a contrast the poet Dante remarked on in the 14th century. Oïl later wore down into the modern French 'oui'.

Which pact of 842 between two grandsons of Charlemagne holds the oldest surviving text in early French?

The Oaths of Strasbourg hold that honour because Louis the German swore his part in his brother's language, so that the soldiers of Charles the Bald could understand him.

Which French dictionary publisher's emblem is a woman blowing dandelion seeds into the wind?

Larousse pairs the image with the motto 'Je sème à tout vent', I sow to every wind; its best-known book, the one-volume Petit Larousse, first appeared in 1905.

Georges Perec wrote the novel La Disparition without once using which letter, the most common in French?

E never appears in its 300 pages, and translators have honoured the rule: the English edition, titled A Void, does without the letter as well.

Which angled quotation marks, written « », enclose speech and quotations in French books and newspapers?

Guillemets are 'little Williams', apparently named after the 16th-century punchcutter Guillaume Le Bé, although he did not invent them: they are found in a book of 1527.

Which French past tense lives on in novels and history books but has all but vanished from speech?

Passé simple is the literary past, replaced in conversation by the passé composé. Said aloud now, it is mostly a joke, a way of making a sentence sound mock-pretentious or refined.