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Random French Words #2

Can you translate these common French words into English?
All the answers are a single word
If multiple answers fit, guess the most common. Pedants will be thrown into the Seine.
Quiz by Quizmaster
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Last updated: August 8, 2019
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First submittedSeptember 30, 2014
Times taken87,891
Average score79.2%
Rating4.51
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French
English
Rouge
Red
Deux
Two
Bon
Good
Très
Very
Bienvenue
Welcome
Fin
End
Année
Year
Merci
Thanks
French
English
Noël
Christmas
Vin
Wine
Sans
Without
Femme
Woman
Après
After
Monde
World
Maison
House
Libre
Free
French
English
Mort
Dead
Tête
Head
Ville
Town
Guerre
War
École
School
Garçon
Boy
Fête
Party
Visage
Face
+2
Level 29
Dec 7, 2014
birthday should be the best answer for "fête" like in happy birthday = bonne fête
+20
Level 74
Jan 4, 2015
"Bonne fête" is only used in Canada. In Europe and Africa you say "bon anniversaire" or even "joyeux anniversaire". In France, "bonne fête" means happy name-day (as in the feast day of the saint you're named for).
+1
Level 48
Nov 13, 2021
I live in Canada and have heard both.
+3
Level 86
Jan 4, 2015
"Fête" has a much broader meaning. It can be translated by feast, festival, celebration, party or holiday...
+3
Level 40
Jan 26, 2016
We do "fêtes d'anniversaire" like you might do "birthday parties", so you see the problem.
+1
Level 57
Mar 8, 2017
bonne fete = good party
+2
Level 40
Mar 9, 2017
@jajaco2017 Not really, at least in France. Saying "bonne fête" to someone refers to a specific celebration (either it's your name day, or Mother/Father day or your birthday (Quebec)) ; but it's about the occasion, not the party itself (there is no need for a party actually). "Bonnes fêtes", plural, is used for the celebrations surrounding of the year's end (usually Christmas and New Year's Eve). If you want to wish a "good party" to someone, you'll likely say something like "have fun", "amuse-toi bien".

So "fête" itself can mean "party" as it can mean a specific celebration. But alone and with no context, it's "party" that comes to mind straight and first.

+1
Level 57
Mar 8, 2017
Bon anniversaire
+1
Level 50
Dec 11, 2014
Even though "happy birthday" could be translated by "Bonne fête", the best answer is "Joyeux anniversaire" and not "bonne fête". Anniversaire is used when an event commemorates something that happened the same day as the day of the "anniversaire". In this case, it is the birth of someone,

"Fête" has a broader meaning. It could be used to name almost any celebration, whether it's a birthday or a random party.

+2
Level 68
Feb 16, 2021
In France, the two aren't interchangeable, and "bonne fête" is never used for someone's birthday (see comment above). I don't know if it's different in other francophone countries, but I'm a 100% sure about France.
+3
Level 78
Jan 4, 2015
Got em all, toot sweet.
+1
Level 82
Jan 4, 2015
Maybe girl or female...
+3
Level 86
Jan 4, 2015
The french word for "girl" is strictly "fille".
+1
Level 82
Jan 4, 2015
and village would make a lot of sense for ville...
+1
Level 44
Jan 4, 2015
Seconding this, it took me a couple tries to get town.
+19
Level ∞
Jan 4, 2015
Village in French is village.
+3
Level 86
Jan 4, 2015
Absolutely, we use village in french for small localities. Ville can be translated by either town or city.
+2
Level 40
Jan 26, 2016
No, for exemple the city of Paris uses and communicates with "ville de Paris". So, you see, not a village...
+1
Level 20
Apr 7, 2016
I am currently taking French and we are learning places right now. My teacher told me ville meant downtown
+2
Level 75
Apr 25, 2016
Downtown is centre ville, a part of the town, not the entire town. In France, ville is town. I'm sure, I'm french !

Maybe your teacher's french is like my english...

Or it's perhaps different in Canada, Haïti or anywhere else people speak french (better for your teacher !).

+1
Level 82
Mar 9, 2017
In the language I speak there is no appreciable difference between a town and a village.
+19
Level 37
Jul 14, 2017
Hurray for your language. In other languages there are distinctions.
+2
Level 82
Sep 29, 2019
Are the answers in this quiz in English or some other language? If the latter, then you make an excellent point.
+3
Level 59
Aug 17, 2020
A village is smaller than a town.
+2
Level 22
Mar 26, 2017
If English is your only language that makes sense... but in French 'ville' is city, and 'village' is village. English has alot 'borrowed' from the French language, so if we were being historically accurate you could say that it should be the other way around :)
+2
Level 68
Feb 16, 2021
In French, there is even a legal definition of "ville", which is any commune with 2000 or more inhabitants. Colloquially, the definition is less strict, but a village is definitely a more rural place. You'd never call Paris a village (or you'd do so ironically, or to make some specific point).
+1
Level 65
Nov 19, 2021
It's really funny when someone who doesn't speak a language - I mean French in this case - tries to explain which words are a correct answer. Ridiculous...
+1
Level 32
Mar 18, 2022
Ville is city or town, though? It's somewhat of a (false) cognate sure, but not really. There's no reason for it to count as village.
+1
Level 66
Jan 4, 2015
That was pretty easy. 3:12 left :P
+1
Level 66
Dec 8, 2015
Shouldn't really be a correct translation for "tres"
+5
Level 72
Dec 16, 2015
"Really" translates to "Vraiment". So no, not really.
+1
Level 56
Feb 18, 2016
100%, which is surprising as I did very badly at French in school, and that was many many annees ago!
+1
Level 63
Aug 12, 2016
Even though I don't speak French I got 17. Good score I'd say. Helps that other languages have taken over a few words.
+1
Level 58
Mar 8, 2017
100 percent but not fast enough to escape 40 percent bracket in comparison to all the other test talers
+1
Level 74
Mar 8, 2017
I feel like I've got a bit of an unfair advantage here. That being that I'm studying French...
+1
Level 62
Mar 8, 2017
Ville is actually City, Villages is town.
+4
Level 67
Mar 8, 2017
"Village" means the same in both French and English. However, if you're talking about something bigger than a village, English has two different words - town and city, depending on the size - while in French, we only have "ville" (sometimes we'll qualify it to say "une petite ville" or "une grande ville"). As a French speaker, I remember how confusing I found it, when I was starting to learn English, to decide whether a place should be called a city or a town. To this day I sometimes still don't know where the line is between the two. L.A. or New York City are easy, but all those mid-range cities/towns (in terms of population I mean) like Albany or Trenton or Hartford. Or even Atlantic City which I would I probably called a town but hesitate to because of the word "city" in its name.
+5
Level 57
Mar 8, 2017
So there are 2 "Freetown" capital cities

Freetown and Libreville. You learn something new every day (if you're stupid like me and didn't work it out before)

+1
Level 65
Mar 8, 2017
Easy five points. But one thing doesn't make sense: why are some words in their feminine and some in their masculine? (e.g. Bon/Bonne, and then Année/An)
+5
Level 86
Mar 9, 2017
It's a bit hard to explain but Année and An are coexisting nouns that are not the masculine and feminine form of the same word, they have distinct entries in the dictionary though being basically synonyms. (It's the same as for jour/journée, matin/matinée and soir/soirée).
+1
Level 68
Feb 16, 2021
I'd be hard pressed to tell you the difference between "an" and "année", but I can tell you for sure that they're used in different expressions. For instance, New Year is the "jour de l'an". It can never be the "jour de l'année" (that would be any single day of the year). On "jour de l'an", you nevertheless wish each other a "bonne année", not a "bon an".
+1
Level 68
Feb 16, 2021
For jour/journée, matin/matinée, and soir/soirée, it seems to me that the shorter version means a specific moment in time, whereas the longer one means a duration of time. As a consequence, they're often used in different contexts. For instance, if I want to know what you're doint this evening (as in, at that moment in time), I'll use "soir", but if I want to know how you're spending your evening (emphasizing a duration), I will use "soirée".
+1
Level 76
Nov 19, 2021
as far as i've gathered, année is a specific calendar year like 2021, where an is just any 24-hour period
+1
Level 68
Feb 9, 2024
You mean 365-day period...
+1
Level 66
Mar 9, 2017
Got 'em all eventually. Only one I had to come back to was "bienvenue", but then I remembered Joel Grey in "Caberet".
+1
Level 89
Mar 9, 2017
Pulp Fiction helped me remember garçon.
+1
Level 51
Mar 9, 2017
"Garçon means boy" came to my mind also.
+1
Level 71
Nov 19, 2021
Embarrassed to say that I thought "garçon" was a type of food.
+1
Level 53
Mar 9, 2017
Nice quiz, good word selection, had no problems with the answers allowed.
+1
Level 66
Mar 10, 2017
All 24 but that's probably because it's my second language
+2
Level 61
Mar 11, 2017
Easy stuff, when you took it for nine years in school and have Quebecois friends who often forget it's not your first language. :P
+2
Level 22
Mar 26, 2017
Officially bilingual growing up next to Quebec... yeah this was one of the easiest quizzes lol 24/24
+2
Level 84
Mar 31, 2017
18/24. Man, those French have a different word for everything! :-)
+1
Level 66
Jan 14, 2019
haha
+2
Level 66
Jan 14, 2019
Shouldnt female be accepted for femme. (not meaning naming the gender, but as a noun aswell)
+1
Level 82
Sep 29, 2019
yes
+1
Level 82
Sep 29, 2019
If femelle in French means female (adjective), that's irrelevant, because female in English can be used as a noun that means the same thing as woman.
+2
Level 86
Sep 29, 2019
Femelle as a noun is used for female animals in French.
+1
Level 82
Sep 29, 2019
Which is completely and entirely irrelevant when you're talking about which words in English can be used to represent the same concept as the French femme. In English, the word female can and is used to refer to human women.

How many people are in that band?

Four.

Are any of them girls?

Yeah there's two males and two females.

I know how to speak English... I teach the subject to non-native speakers like yourself in fact.

+7
Level 86
Sep 30, 2019
You're becoming offensive, and for nothing since I was just giving clarifications about the french word, which can be a noun but not with the same set of acceptations as in English. You're not really a nice person, kal, but I won't give you the pleasure of getting angry for such an insignificant topic. I just hope that the QM, which is a better english-speaker than me, won't listen to you on this one.
+2
Level 63
Oct 2, 2019
+1 to Arp2600
+1
Level 82
Oct 4, 2019
I'm sorry that you felt offended but I wasn't being offensive. There's a difference. My students had trouble with this sometimes, as well. You are not arguing with me about French, which I admittedly know nothing about, you're arguing with me about what the words mean in English. I feel like I would know this. I've taught ESOL for over a decade. That was the point. No need for offense.

QM can listen to me if he wants to be right. If not, that's fine, too. Not a big deal.

+5
Level 78
Nov 9, 2020
Given your set of rules on translation, femme could also be translated as chick, broad, piece of skirt, because somebody might use those terms in English in certain circumstances. Get over yourself dude.
+2
Level 68
Feb 9, 2024
Isn't the use of "female" to talk about a woman pretty much restricted to incels, in English?
+1
Level 43
Apr 7, 2019
Is 13/24 okay for someone who's never taken or learned French?
+2
Level 69
Apr 7, 2019
For Canadians this is easy stuff.
+1
Level 72
Sep 30, 2019
Yeah, no. A majority of Canadians only speaks English. Québec, Acadie and some isolated communities across the country (mostly in Ontario and Manitoba) are the only ones where people speak French.
+2
Level 47
Oct 1, 2019
Right but this isn't asking us to speak fluently in French, just knowing basic words that we would have picked up from having that one nearly useless French class each year in school for those not in immersion would suffice for this quiz
+4
Level 84
May 23, 2019
A little surprised that face is the lowest guessed answer given that visage means the same thing in English. I guess it's not that commonly used.
+1
Level 46
Aug 5, 2019
city or town for ville . . . but not village?
+6
Level ∞
Aug 5, 2019
Village is not correct. The French word for village is village.
+3
Level 35
Sep 29, 2019
This made me realize that Sierra Leone's capital (Freetown) is a translated capital of Gabon (Libreville)
+2
Level 56
May 26, 2020
About all this, and especially about "femme" (and "ville") you have to think about the way the word is used in French, and then find the equivalent in English.

For me, as Portuguese native, another Romance Language, I can clearly understand why "femme" would never be "girl", it's the same in Portuguese: "mulher" (femme) is not a "girl".

If I was doing the opposite, yes I could translate "girl" for "mulher", as in English it is used as "woman". The point is be closer to the real use in the original language.

And this is why translators are important, otherwise we would all be using Google Translate.

+1
Level 59
Jan 3, 2021
I got 8 thats what 5 months of french gets you
+1
Level 51
Jan 4, 2021
Can you allow Die for Dead
+1
Level 31
Feb 12, 2021
Correct me if I am wrong but "Bon" should be "Bonne"
+2
Level 68
Feb 16, 2021
You're wrong ;-). Bon is the masculine, bonne the feminine. Both would be correct on this quiz, but French is a misogynistic language (quite officially - a grammar rule in French is that the masculine always trumps the feminine).
+6
Level 79
Feb 16, 2021
That doesn't make it a misogynistic language 🙄 You'll find similarities to this in many languages around the world
+1
Level 68
Feb 9, 2024
I'm not saying that French is the *only* misogynistic language... but, in France, this rule was actually created in the 17th century quite explicitly out of misogyny.
+1
Level 79
Feb 16, 2021
20/24! 'This beats or equals 39.3% of test takers' 😬
+1
Level 18
May 10, 2021
Female should also work for femme
+2
Level 46
Aug 20, 2021
Bit confusing as a german because u have to translate it twice :D But it was doable. Nice quiz!
+1
Level 58
Nov 19, 2021
Fête = party, tête = tarty
+1
Level 71
Nov 19, 2021
The Front Page blurb was right, I was pleasantly surprised at how many of these I knew. I tend to fail most of the other French quizzes on this site, but got 20/24 on this one, enough for 3 points. Not great maybe, but I'm pretty satisfied with that as someone who knows absolutely no French.
+1
Level 76
Nov 19, 2021
all these nitpickers must surely be inSeine :)
+1
Level 75
Nov 19, 2021
Suggest accept "waiter" for garcon.

Great quiz. I'd enjoy similar in other languages, e.g. German, Italian, Dothraki.

+1
Level 11
Dec 16, 2022
waiter for garcon ? what i dont understand why waiter is someone who is waiting ?
+1
Level 67
Nov 20, 2021
Got 14, I know literally no French
+1
Level 65
Apr 16, 2022
Between direct norman influence and some common latin roots, over half of english words are similar to french
+1
Level 65
Jan 20, 2022
Mort Tete :D Tres Bien, Medecins Sans Frontieres, Petit Monde, Merci beaucoup,
+1
Level 42
Feb 1, 2022
Merci beaucoup pour ce quiz, ce fut simple mais rigolo, du moins sympathique :D
+1
Level 11
Dec 16, 2022
2:57 yayy
+1
Level 39
Jan 3, 2023
maybe add die for mort?
+1
Level 35
Mar 11, 2023
die is a verb while mort is a noun. Die should not be accepted. the translation of to die in french is mourir
+1
Level 27
Mar 23, 2023
I'm Chinese. I 've learned English and German but never French. I get 15
+1
Level 52
Jun 9, 2023
Seven years of French classes in school finally paid off.
+1
Level 45
Feb 8, 2024
Birthday definitely needs to be accepted! I know most people outside Canada wouldn't use it that way but here we definitely do and about 8 million French speakers isn't nothing.
+1
Level 28
Feb 8, 2024
"You'll be surprised at how many you know"! I knew only merci.
+1
Level 57
Feb 8, 2024
I mean- I was surprised I knew seven...
+1
Level 26
Feb 10, 2024
being a native German speaker this was quite hard for me since I have learned both French and English in school but I never had to translate sth from French to English before only to German