French Language Trivia
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100 free French Language trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
French is a language of traps and treats. A librairie sells books rather than lending them, a word for 80 hides a sum, an accent marks a letter that vanished centuries ago, and half the English dictionary turns out to be on loan from across the Channel. These 100 questions stay on the language itself: the phrases every learner meets, the false friends that catch English speakers out, idioms about cats, hens and apples, grammar and spelling quirks, the French words hiding inside everyday English, the academy that polices the dictionary, and the countries and cities where French is spoken now. Each answer comes with a short explanation, so a wrong guess still teaches you something. It suits a French class, a pub quiz round, or anyone who has ever wondered what mayday really means. Play it on your phone with instant answers, or print it for the table.
30 of 100 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Members of the Académie française, which has policed French since Cardinal Richelieu's day, carry what nickname?
The Immortals
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.
Q 02A French speaker saying quatre-vingts for 80 is literally saying what, a relic of an older counting system?
Four twenties
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'.
Q 03In which country do some French speakers say huitante for 80, where France says quatre-vingts?
Switzerland
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.
Q 04The distress call mayday, adopted for aircraft in the 1920s, is generally traced to the French for what?
Help me
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.
Q 05The circumflex on words such as hôpital, forêt and île marks the loss of which letter from older French?
S
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.
Q 06In France, a librairie is a classic false friend for English speakers; what kind of place is it actually?
A bookshop
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.
Q 07What do French concert audiences shout for a repeat, since encore, the word English borrowed, is not what they say?
Bis
Bis, 'a second time', is one French cry, alongside une autre; encore just means 'again' in French, and Italian audiences shout bis too.
Q 08Quebec's red octagonal road signs read arrêt; which single word do the same signs carry across France itself?
Stop
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.
Q 09Which Scrabble champion won a 2015 French-language world title after reportedly memorising the dictionary in nine weeks, speaking no French?
Nigel Richards
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.
Q 10The English word mortgage comes from a Law French term of the Middle Ages; what does it literally mean?
A death pledge
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.
Q 11In French, matinée, which English uses for an afternoon show, actually means which part of the day?
The morning
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.
Q 12In a French restaurant an entrée is which course, the opposite of what the word means in the United States?
The starter
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.
Q 13A French pharmacist's préservatif, a notorious false friend for English speakers, is what?
A condom
Q 21A French speaker who tombe dans les pommes, literally 'falls in the apples', has just done what?
Fainted
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.
Q 22Quand les poules auront des dents, the French way of saying 'when pigs fly', imagines hens growing what?
Teeth
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'.
Q 23A French speaker who 'has le cafard' is feeling blue; as a plain noun, cafard names which household pest?
A cockroach
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.
Q 14The French adverb actuellement is a false friend: rather than 'actually', what does it normally mean?
Currently
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.
Q 15The French verb blesser looks like a blessing to English eyes, but to blesser someone is to do what to them?
To wound
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.
Q 16A tourist in France who tries to book a room at the hôtel de ville is actually standing in what?
The town hall
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.
Q 17What single word do French dancers and actors say to wish each other luck, 'break a leg' not being their custom?
Merde
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.
Q 18The stage-Frenchman's oath sacrebleu is usually explained as a minced form of which phrase, bleu standing in for the rhyme?
Sacré Dieu
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.
Q 19A French sweetheart addressed as mon petit chou is, word for word, 'my little' which vegetable?
A cabbage
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.
Q 20To poser un lapin, which translates word for word as 'to put down a rabbit', is French for doing what to someone?
Standing them up
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 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.
Q 24The French mock clumsy French as speaking it comme une vache espagnole, that is, like which animal from Spain?
A cow
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.
Q 25A French speaker with d'autres chats à fouetter has 'cats to whip'; what does the English equivalent have instead?
Fish to fry
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.
Q 26RSVP on an English invitation abbreviates the French répondez s'il vous plaît, which word for word means what?
Respond if it pleases you
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.
Q 27Aujourd'hui is a pile-up of au, jour, de and hui that literally means what?
On the day of today
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.
Q 28The French word for a bra, soutien-gorge, borrows the everyday French word for which part of the body?
The throat
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.
Q 29The word denim is a worn-down contraction of a French phrase for a serge cloth from which southern city?
Nîmes
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.
Q 30The English word curfew descends from the Old French couvre-feu, a medieval evening order to do what?
Cover the fire
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.