French word of the week: tour

Welcome back to all of our French learners. Today we’re looking at the noun tour. While this word exists in English with the exact same spelling, it doesn’t quite sound the same – listen to the pronunciation in the audio clip below:

Now we’ll move on to the translation, but again, try not to compare it to the English word you already know. You might feel tempted to directly translate tour as ‘tour’ in English, and this can be one possible meaning (in the sense of ‘journey’) – for example, you might have heard of the Tour de France, the cycling race. But in French, as well as tour, this word can be translated turn, walk, ride, lap or tower. Something special about this noun is that it means different things depending on its gender.

• As a masculine noun, le/un tour can mean turn, ride, lap or tour, among other things.
• As a feminine noun, la/une tour can mean tower, tower block, or the castle piece in chess.

If you need some extra help, you can review our Easy Learning French Grammar pages on nouns.

We’ll start with examples of the feminine noun in action:

Notre hôtel était parfait ! Nous pouvions voir la Tour Eiffel de notre balcon. Our hotel was perfect! We were able to see the Eiffel Tower from our balcony.

Il y a plein de tours au quartier où elle habite à Hong Kong. There are lots of tower blocks in the area where she lives in Hong Kong.

monter en haut de la tour to climb to the top of the tower

Chaque joueur d’échecs a deux tours noires ou blanches. Each chess player has two black or white castles.

Now we’ll have a look at the masculine noun in everyday French. This version of the noun is a lot more common, as it often appears in set phrases:

faire le tour de quelque chose to go/walk around something

faire le tour du monde to go/travel around the world

Voudriez-vous faire un tour du lac ? Would you all like to go on a stroll around the lake?

C’est mon tour. It’s my turn.

à chacun son tour one at a time; everyone gets a turn

À qui le tour ? Whose turn is it?

faire demi-tour to do a U-turn

Les élections présidentielles se dérouleront sur deux tours avant les résultats. The presidential elections will unfold over two rounds before the results.

You might have noticed in the final example that tour has an ‘s’ on the end, making it tours. This is to make the word from a singular noun into a plural. However, if you see tours with a capital letter, Tours, then you might need to reconsider the translation. This is the name of a city in France, located in the Loire Valley.

That’s all we have for this week. Now it’s your turn to take what you’ve learned and build it into your French vocabulary. See you next time!

Written by Holly Tarbet, freelance copywriter and editor.

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