It’s time for another French word of the week! This time, we’re going to be looking at the word sens.
You can hear the pronunciation of sens in the audio clip below:
Let’s start with the English translation of sens. Regular readers of our blog will know to avoid looking for similarities with English words, at the risk of it being a ‘false friend’. However, in this case, sens does indeed have a very close equivalent in English – the word sense, in terms of our physical senses and in terms of ‘meaning’. As well as this, it can translate as direction or way.
Sens is a masculine noun, which means the article preceding it will be le or un in the singular, or les in the plural. Normally we just add -s at the end of a word to make a French singular noun into a plural, but because sens already ends in -s, there is no spelling change. For more information on understanding nouns, visit our Easy Learning French Grammar section on nouns.
Let’s now take a look at some examples of when you might see or hear this noun in use:
Il y a cinq sens – vue, ouïe, odorat, goût, toucher. There are five senses – sight, hearing, smell, taste, touch.
Je ne comprends pas le sens de ce poème. I don’t understand the meaning of this poem.
avoir le sens de l’humour to have a sense of humour
avoir du bon sens to have common sense
À mon sens, ça ne va pas marcher. I don’t think that’s going to work. (as in, ‘in my opinion’)
dans un sens in a way
au sens propre literally; in the truest sense
sens unique one-way (street; route)
dans le sens de la longueur / la largeur lengthways / widthways
La nouvelle autoroute sera construite dans le sens nord-sud. The new motorway will be built in a north-to-south direction.
Arrêtez-vous ! Vous n’allez pas dans le bon sens. Stop! You’re not going in the right direction.
Just as a side note, it’s handy to know that sens is also one of the present indicative conjugations of the verbs sentir and se sentir, which mean to smell or to feel, respectively. You can check out the full verb table of sentir, but we’ve also given a couple of examples below, just for a clearer context:
Est-ce que tu sens la fumée ? Can you smell smoke?
Je ne veux pas sortir ce soir, je me sens mal. I don’t want to go out tonight, I feel unwell.
We hope that this week’s blog made sense to you as a French learner! We’ll cover the meaning and details of yet another word next time – see you then.
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.
