French word of the week: lieu

Welcome back French learners – you’ve waited a whole week for your next instalment of our blog, now it’s time to learn a new word! Today we’re looking at the noun lieu.

We always start by listening to its pronunciation. Use the audio clip below to hear how it sounds:

When we’re trying to translate a French word into English, we often look for similarities in sounds or spellings. While this technique is not always useful, in the case of lieu, there is a directly related English word which you might know of. If you’ve ever had a job where you’ve worked overtime or on weekends, sometimes you get the extra time back as holiday time rather than pay. This is known as TOIL or ‘time off in lieu’.

So, how has this French word made its way into this English term? Lieu translates as place – if we go back to the TOIL phrase, it’s literally ‘extra holiday time off in place of money’, or essentially ‘time off instead’. While it’s helpful for learners to connect this word to an English phrase, you’ll find in our examples that lieu appears in a much wider range of contexts in French.

As a masculine noun, when you see lieu with a definite or an indefinite article, it will use le or un. If you’re not familiar with nouns and articles, build your confidence and knowledge by reading our Easy Learning French Grammar pages on definite articles, indefinite articles and noun gender.

Now we’re ready to look at a few examples of lieu in action:

lieu de naissance place of birth (you might see this on a passport or form for example)

lieu de travail workplace

Si vous vous perdez, veuillez rassembler au lieu de rencontre. If you get lost, please assemble at the meeting point.

J’ai peur qu’elle aille voyager dans les lieux dangereux. I’m scared that she’s going to travel in dangerous places.

avoir lieu to take place

La fête aura lieu chez mes parents. The party will take place at my parents’ house.

au lieu de instead of

Nous avons acheté un nouveau canapé au lieu d’une nouvelle table. We bought a new sofa instead of a new table.

Tes enfants devraient étudier au lieu de jouer aux jeux vidéo. Your kids should be studying instead of playing video games.

donner lieu à to give cause for; to cause

Je ne donnerais jamais lieu à des désagréments. I would never cause any trouble.

en premier lieu in the first place; firstly; first of all

Congratulations on learning the ins and outs of yet another word of the week. You’re really going places with your French vocabulary!

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.