We’re here to deliver yet another dose of French vocabulary! For this week’s blog, we’re looking at the word contre.
To listen to its pronunciation, check out the audio clip below:
As for what contre means, while it might not seem clearly related to any English words, the prefix ‘counter-’ might have come to mind? This is the closest similarity to its translations, which include ‘counter-‘, ‘against’ and (in exchange) ‘for’.
Moving on to the grammar, contre has some complexities… In most cases, you’ll come across this word used as a preposition. If you need a reminder on what this means, head over to our Easy Leaning French Grammar section on prepositions. However, there are some situations where you might come across contre as an adverb and even a masculine noun.
We’ll start by looking at examples of the preposition. To help you work out when it’s a preposition, you can check the word placement – generally you cannot finish a sentence with a preposition, which you’ll notice in our list below:
être contre quelque chose to be against something
Je ne sais pas s’il est pour ou contre cette idée. I don’t know if he’s for or against this idea.
On doit lutter contre l’injustice ! We must fight against injustice!
Est-ce que vous pouvez laisser les cartons contre le mur ? Can you leave the boxes against the wall?
échanger quelque chose contre quelque chose to exchange something for something else
Elle a voulu nous donner une pizza contre une bouteille de vin. She wanted to give us a pizza for a bottle of wine.
When we use contre as an adverb, we can indeed place it at the end of a sentence:
Je n’ai rien contre. I have nothing against (it).
Tu vas voter pour ou contre ? Are you going to vote for or against?
When it comes to the noun, you might notice that there’s more variety in potential translations. There are also hundreds of nouns which use contre- as a prefix, in the same way we use ‘counter-‘ in English. For example:
peser le pour et le contre to weigh up the pros and cons
par contre on the other hand
contre-exemple (m) counterexample
contre-attaque (f) counterattack
contre-mesure (f) countermeasure
contre-culture (f) counterculture
Finally, there is also a related verb which you might come across:
contrer to block; to counter
Its first and third-person present conjugations are also spelled like contre, so just be aware that you might be looking at a verb, noun, adverb or a preposition!
We hope that our blog has given you enough insight about contre for you to go ahead and try it out. As long as you’re not against learning more French words, we’ll see you here again next week.
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.
