French word of the week: besoin

Our French blog aims to help build your knowledge and vocabulary by looking at the finer details of a useful word every week. Today we’re studying the word besoin.

Before we begin, you can hear its pronunciation in the audio clip below:

Besoin is a word that you’ll probably need to use quite often. In fact, we’ve just used the word in English in our previous sentence! The English translation of besoin is need.

Besoin is a masculine noun. When working out the gender of a noun, you can tell it’s masculine if it uses the definite and indefinite articles le or un. You might also see its plural form besoins, which you create by simply adding an -s on the end to make the singular noun into a plural. If you’d like to read more on nouns in French, you can visit our Easy Learning French Grammar section on nouns.

Let’s have a look at some examples:

en cas de besoin if needed, if necessary

les besoins primaires basic needs

satisfaire à un besoin to satisfy a need

Les infirmiers répondront aux besoins de nos patients. The nurses will respond to the needs of our patients.

dans le besoin in need, needy

Chaque soir, je donne à manger aux chiens du quartier dans le besoin. Every evening, I feed local dogs in need.

Now for a bit more grammar. When you find any form of the verb avoir (‘to have’) before besoin, plus any form of the preposition de after it, then this construction as a whole becomes a very common verb phrase:

avoir besoin de quelque chose to need something

avoir besoin de faire quelque chose to need to do something

Essentially you just conjugate avoir or use the infinitive, followed by besoin, followed by de, d’, de la, de l’ or des, depending on the noun number and gender of what you ‘need’; or, if you’re following with a verb infinitive of the action you ‘need’ to do, besoin will be followed by de or d’ before a vowel.

Je n’ai pas eu besoin de l’aide. I did not need help. (noun example)

Nous sommes très fatigués, nous avons besoin de dormir. We’re very tired, we need to sleep. (verb example)

Si vous aviez besoin d’argent, votre grand-mère pourrait vous aider. If you needed money, your grandmother would be able to help you.

Elle n’aura pas besoin d’emprunter tes clés demain. She will not need to borrow your keys tomorrow.

Well, we reckon that’s all you’ll need to get started with this new word for now! Of course, if you’re in need of any extra information, our Easy Learning French Grammar pages are here to help. See you here next week for another instalment of French vocab.

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.