It’s our first French word of the week for 2025! Welcome back to our blog, where we’re taking a look at the verb ennuyer.
Before we get into all of the details, have a listen to the audio clip to hear how to pronounce it:
To translate ennuyer, we could say to bother, to trouble, to bore or its closest-sounding and -looking word in English, to annoy. While this verb doesn’t express particularly positive connotations or meanings, you’re likely to come across it quite often! You might have also noticed a link to the meaning of a borrowed French word in English, the idea of suffering from ‘ennui’.
As for the grammar, the rules are fairly simple, as ennuyer follows most of the regular conjugation patterns for -er verbs. It does however belong to the group of verbs ending in -yer which have a spelling change in the present tense, the future and the conditional. To put it simply, you might see the letter y replaced with the letter i in certain tenses.
Shall we have a look at some examples of this verb in action?
Mes parents nous ennuient avec ses histoires de travail. My parents are boring us with their work stories.
Arrête d’ennuyer ton oncle avec toutes ces questions ! Stop annoying your uncle with all these questions!
Cela m’ennuierait de partir si tôt. It would bother me leaving so early.
J’ai peur que je vous ennuie lorsque je parle de la musique. I’m worried that I bore you when I talk about music.
Ce livre m’a beaucoup ennuyé. This book really bored me.
In our examples up to this point, we’ve seen the action of troubling, bothering or boring. But you can also use ennuyer as a reflexive verb – that is, a verb that applies to oneself. Note how the meaning changes slightly:
s’ennuyer to be bored; to get bored; to become bored
Je ne vais pas regarder ce film avec toi, je m’ennuierai. I’m not going to watch that film with you, I’ll be bored.
Maria n’étudie plus avec nous parce qu’elle s’ennuie. Maria doesn’t study with us anymore because she gets bored.
On ne s’ennuierait jamais avec ses frères ! You would never get bored with his brothers around!
Est-ce que tu t’ennuies ? Are you getting bored?
Finally, a quick word about this verb’s related adjectives:
- ennuyeux; ennuyeuse(s)
- ennuyant(s); ennuyante(s)
While ennuyeux and ennuyant are mostly interchangeable when describing someone or something as boring or annoying, there are slight nuances in their meanings.
You use ennuyeux and its variants to describe something (or someone) you consider inherently boring, for example:
- Céline est ennuyeuse. Céline is boring.
On the other hand, you might use ennuyant and its variants to describe something (or someone) that is annoying or boring you at a particular point in time:
- C’est ennuyant que nous devions attendre dehors. It’s annoying that we have to wait outside.
Thank you for reading our blog, we hope that we didn’t bore you with our explanation of ennuyer. We’re glad to have you back to learn another year’s worth of words in 2025 – only 51 more to go!
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.
