It’s that time again… Welcome back to French word of the week. Today, we’re going to study the intricacies of the word heure.
As always, we’ll begin by listening to the pronunciation. Check out the audio clip below:
Moving on to the translation, there are a couple of hints for you. First of all, it doesn’t look too dissimilar from a certain common English word. And secondly, we’ve already given you its translation in the first sentence of this blog – heure means hour or time.
If you’ve been learning French for a while, you might already have come across this word in the basic phrases you’ve picked up, like those to do with asking for and telling the time. However, it does have a lot of other uses, especially in set phrases.
Heure is a feminine noun, and normally, we would expect feminine nouns in French to be accompanied by articles like une or la. However, as this word begins with a mute ‘h’, the definite article used would be l’ rather than la. You’ll likely find that heure often follows a number rather than an article – so rather than using articles for hints, you might just need to memorise that this noun is feminine!
You can read more about this on our Easy Learning French Grammar pages on noun genders, indefinite articles and definite articles.
Without further ado, let’s get into the examples – of which there are plenty:
« Quelle heure est-il ? » « Il est quinze heures. » “What time is it?” “It’s three o’clock (in the afternoon).” (Note that in French we normally use the 24-hour clock to tell the time.)
Nous devons partir à sept heures et demie. We need to leave at half past seven. (Another note to mention here is that English speakers don’t always include the ‘o’clock’ when giving the time; in French, you’ll always need to include heure.)
À quelle heure ? At what time?
À tout à l’heure ! See you later!
être à l’heure to be on time
Désolée, je ne vais pas arriver à l’heure. Sorry, I’m not going to arrive on time.
C’est l’heure de… It’s … time.
Chez nous c’est l’heure du diner. It’s dinner time at our house.
Nous habitons à une heure de Dakar. We live an hour away from Dakar.
d’heure en heure from one hour to the next; from hour to hour
Elle fait trop de bruit à cette heure-là ! She’s making too much noise at this hour!
Thank you for taking the time to read our latest blog. You could spend hours musing over the different ways to use this word, but we hope you’ve learned enough to understand the basics. See you 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.
