Every week, we welcome learners to our French word of the week blog to learn a useful new word to add to their vocabulary. This time, we’ve chosen the word arrêt.
As always, you can begin by listening to the pronunciation in the audio clip. You might be glad to see this if you’re feeling confused by the circumflex – in other words, the little ‘hat’ on top of the letter e. Press play below to hear how the word should sound:
This noun has quite a few different translations in English: it is often given as stop or stopping, but it can be translated in all sorts of different ways according to the context of the sentence, as you’ll see in our example sentences below.
You can tell arrêt is a masculine noun as you might see the article un before it (the definite article le becomes l’ on account of the vowel at the start of the word). And if you’re ever using it in the plural, you’ll just need to add an s on the end. In our Easy Learning French Grammar section, you can read more about how to turn singular nouns into plurals.
Arrêt appears in a whole lot of compound nouns as well as set phrases, which makes it a very useful word for our blog. Here are just a few different ways in which the word is used in various contexts:
sans arrêt non-stop; continuously
Je ne peux plus supporter ma sœur – elle parle sans arrêt ! I can’t put up with my sister any longer – she talks non-stop!
On a fait un trajet sans arrêt jusqu’à Paris. We took a non-stop journey to Paris.
être à l’arrêt to be stopped; to have come to a stop; to be at a stop sign; to be stationary
Tous ces voitures sont à l’arrêt au feu rouge. All of these cars are stopped at the red light.
Attention à l’arrêt devant nous. Watch out for the stop sign in front of us.
Vous-voulez faire un arrêt avant de monter sur l’autoroute ? Would you like to make a stop/take a break before we get on the motorway?
Il faut descendre au prochain arrêt. You need to get off at the next stop.
arrêt de bus ; arrêt d’autobus bus stop
arrêt d’urgence emergency stop
arrêt cardiaque / arrêt du cœur cardiac arrest / heart attack
arrêt maladie ; arrêt de travail sick leave; time off (work)
On a final note, knowing this noun will also help you in the future with its related verb arrêter. Can you guess what it might mean? That’s right, it simply means ‘to stop’. You can read more in the dictionary entry for arrêter.
We hope that we’ve managed to explain everything you need to know about arrêt. With learning a new word every week, your French vocabulary must be expanding at quite an astounding rate – so don’t stop now!
Written by Holly Tarbet, freelance copywriter and editor.
All opinions expressed on this blog are those of the individual writers, and do not necessarily reflect the opinions or policies of Collins, or its parent company, HarperCollins.
