Welcome back to your weekly dose of French vocabulary. For this blog, we’ve chosen the word monde.
You can find the correct pronunciation in the audio clip below:
This masculine noun might look familiar to any readers who have spent some time in France, as it’s also the name of a major national newspaper – Le Monde. But have you ever wondered what it translates as? Quite simply, the French word monde means ‘world’.
While this seems to imply that this blog will be straightforward with such a simple translation, you’ll find that monde appears in lots of different contexts and set phrases, and it does indeed translate in slightly different ways…
Let’s get into some examples:
Il y a 195 pays dans le monde. There are 195 countries in the world.
faire le tour du monde to go around the world
les sept merveilles du monde the seven Wonders of the World
une carte du monde a world map
au bout du monde at the end of the earth
Je crois que ses chansons sont connues dans le monde entier. I believe that her songs are known all over the world / worldwide / globally.
homme/femme du monde socialite; high society man/woman
le monde des affaires the business world
le monde du travail the world of work
le monde de l’art the art world
le monde francophone the French-speaking world
On ne sait rien du monde littéraire. We know nothing about the literary world.
As you’ve already seen, monde can be both literal, in the planetary sense, as well as figurative, in the sense of a ‘society’ or ‘circle’. However, there is another interesting usage of monde where it can also refer to ‘people’, in the sense of a crowd or group:
Bonjour tout le monde ! Hello everyone!
Y a-t-il du monde dans le jardin ? Is there anyone / Are there many people in the garden?
Il y avait du monde a la fête. There were a lot of people at the party.
Je ne veux pas aller s’il y aura trop de monde. I don’t want to go if there are going to be too many people.
Finally, we wanted to warn you about the translation of a similar-looking verb, monder. Normally we like to share these when our word of the week is a noun, but in this case, it’s not very useful! This word is fairly archaic and uncommon, but it might be interesting nonetheless to know what it means:
monde world; people
monder to peel; to hull
Congratulations on learning a new French word! No matter where in the world you’re reading our blogs from, we hope that you’ll join us again 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
