Another week, another French word! In this edition of our vocabulary blog for French learners, we’re going to study the verb lancer.
Before we start getting into the details, listen to the audio clip to hear how to pronounce the verb infinitive:
To understand how we might translate lancer into English, the first thing to know is that it’s a transitive verb. In other words, a verb which needs to take a direct object to make sense. As for its translations, these most commonly include ‘to throw’, ‘to launch’ and ‘to start (up)’.
In terms of grammar, lancer very nearly follows a regular conjugation pattern for -er verbs. It just falls short on certain conjugations because of the letter ‘c’ in the middle of the word. This sometimes becomes a ‘ç’ cedilla, which allows us to keep the ‘s’ sound rather than pronouncing it as a hard ‘c’. Take a look at the full verb table for lancer for more information.
For more about regular -er verb conjugation, head over to our Easy Learning French Grammar pages for the present indicative, present subjunctive and imperfect tense.
Now we can take a look at some examples of the verb in action:
lancer quelque chose à quelqu’un to throw something to someone
Tu peux me lancer un stylo ? Can you chuck me a pen?
Le gardien de but a lancé le ballon à Mbappé. The goalkeeper threw the ball to Mbappé.
Nous lançons des nouvelles recherches. We are starting to do some new research.
lancer les dés to roll / throw dice
lancer une conversation to start up a conversation
lancer une idée to put forward an idea; to put an idea forward
lancer un magazine to launch a magazine
lancer un appel de fonds to launch a funding appeal
lancer une petition to start a petition
As you can see, there are pretty much unlimited options for nouns that you can use along with lancer, all with slightly different translations of the transitive verb. And there are also situations where you’ll see lancer itself used as a noun rather than a verb. In this case, it will be a masculine noun:
lancer (m) du javelot javelin (in the sense of the athletics event)
la pêche au lancer rod and reel fishing
un lancer franc a free throw (in basketball)
Finally, there’s also the related feminine noun lance, which you might recognise as a similar word in for a long, pointed weapon in English:
une lance a spear
une lance à eau a hose
Whether you’re just getting launched into your French language-learning, or you’re already in deep, thank you for reading this week’s blog! We hope to see you next time for another vocabulary boost.
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
