100 Core French Words - FrenchPod101 (2024)

FAQs

What are the 100 most common French words? ›

While you need very few words to get by on a trip to France and order food in a restaurant, you'll need thousands of words to fully understand all the wonderful nuances of the French language.

According to Larousse, the French language has approximately 135,000 words—but you don't have to know all of them. In fact, one BBC article says that native speakers usually know 15,000 to 20,000 lemmas (i.e., word variants) of their first language.

The more words you know, the better. In fact, it's estimated that you need to know around 5,000 words to be fluent in French, although native speakers will often know up to 30,000! That's a lot of words, making vocabulary learning a bit of a numbers game.

Basic Greetings and Phrases

These common French words and phrases will help you initiate conversations and respond politely in various situations where you need to speak French. Bonjour (Good morning) Bonsoir (Good evening) Bonne journée (Have a nice day) Au revoir (Goodbye)

These numbers in French and certain old Celtic languages derive from a time when people counted using a base of twenty. I believe they counted using not only their fingers but also their toes, hence a base of twenty was used.

Likewise, there's no word for “eighty” in standard French. * The French say quatre-vingts, literally four-twenties. ** So 81 is quatre-vingt-un (four-twenty-one), 82 is quatre-vingt-deux (four-twenty-two), etc.

It is an official language of 29 countries and has an estimated 80 million native speakers, and 235 million people can speak it fluently. Another estimated 75 to 110 million people speak it as a second language.

Translation between English and Arabic is not always straightforward. Arabic has over 12 million distinct words.

How long is the longest French word? ›

French. The longest word, hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobie (36 letters) is the fear (or phobia) of long words.