French word of the week: fort

This week, our blog is exploring the word fort. First of all, listen to how it sounds. Below, you can find an audio clip for the masculine singular form of fort:

Now, we’ve warned you before about ‘false friends’. When learning another language, these are words that look and sometimes sound just like a word in another language, except they mean something different. In this case, you might think fort is simply a fort or fortress. While this is true in its noun form, this is one of the less common usages. The most common translation of fort is strong.

Fort can be used as both an adverb and an adjective (we’ll cover the noun a bit later) but there’s an important distinction for the latter. You need to make the adjective forms agree with the noun – that is, change the spelling depending on the gender and quantity of the noun(s) described.

Because of this, the adjective fort has four different spellings that you’ll need to recognise:

• Fort – masculine singular
• Forte – feminine singular
• Forts – masculine plural
• Fortes – feminine plural

Let’s move on to look at examples of this word in action – firstly, as an adjective…:

Ma grand-mère préfère les whiskies les plus forts. My grandmother prefers the strongest whiskies.

Pour être pompier, il faut être fort et courageux. In order to be a firefighter, you need to be strong and brave.

Ces murs forts ont été construit au seizième siècle. These strong walls were built in the sixteenth century.

être fort en quelque chose to be good at something

Mes amies sont très fortes en basketball. My friends are really good at basketball.

fort comme un bœuf as strong as an ox

Trop fort ! Nice one! ; Cool!

…and as an adverb:

J’ai fort aimé passer la journée avec toi, mais je dois partir bientôt. I very much enjoyed spending the day with you, but I have to leave soon.

fort peu (de quelque chose) very few (of something)

Fort bien ! Very well!

As we mentioned earlier, there are some situations where fort may be used as a noun too, and it can have lots of different translations depending on context:

un fort a fort (some examples in France might include Fort Louvois, Fort Boyard and Fort de la Platte)

Les mathématiques c’est vraiment son fort. Maths really is his forte / strength.

C’est toujours les forts qui se font choisir en premier pour l’équipe du foot. It’s always the strong ones who get chosen first for the football team.

au plus fort de at the height of

Au plus fort de la guerre, nous avons quitté le pays. At the height of the war, we left the country.

Another week, another word in our blog. We hope your grasp of French is getting stronger and stronger, and that learning a new language is turning out to be your forte!

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.