Welcome back to our weekly blog for French learners! Every week, we cover an interesting word to help improve your vocabulary. Today, we’re studying the word mot.
Take a listen to its pronunciation in the audio clip below:
We’ll start with the English translation in its most basic form, mot means ‘word’. Isn’t that perfect for our word of the week blog? Mot is a masculine noun in French, and you can work out a masculine noun gender when you see articles such as un or le preceding the word. Another important point is knowing how to turn singular nouns into plurals, but mot is an easy one. You can simply add -s to make mots.
Overall, while this seems like quite a straightforward word, it does have a lot of everyday usage and is included in many set phrases. Let’s take a look at mot in action:
motà mot ; mot pour mot word for word; verbatim
en un mot in a word; briefly
gros mot swear word
mot-clé key word
mot de passe password
mot croisé crossword
(se) passer / donner le mot to get the word out; to spread the word
prendre quelqu’un au mot to take somebody at their word
dire un mot à quelqu’un to have a word with someone
Chaque semaine, nous apprenons de nouveaux mots français. We learn new French words every week.
Pourriez-vous me dire un mot sur ce problème ? Could you tell me a few words about the issue? (note that the singular word translates as a plural in this set phrase)
Mon frère veut toujours avoir le dernier mot. My brother always wants to have the last word.
As well as ‘word’, we can also translate mot as a ‘message’, ‘note’, ‘saying’ and more. It might help you remember if you think about the word ‘motto’, which has the French word mot within!
To illustrate these slightly different translations, we’ll look at some more examples below:
mot célèbre famous saying
bon mot witty remark/saying
mot d’auteurquote
mot-dièse hashtag
laisser un mot to leave a note/message
Je vais lui écrire un mot. I’m going to write him a note.
On a envoyé un mot pour leur dire « au revoir ». We sent them a message to say “goodbye”.
Thank you for reading our word of the week blog, or should we say our mot de la semaine blog! We hope you enjoyed this edition – feel free to tell your friends and spread the word if so. See you next time.
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.
