Are you hoping to start your week by learning a French word? Well, our blog is the perfect place for you! In this edition, we’re looking at the word pair.
Before we delve deep into what this word means, listen to the audio clip to hear its pronunciation:
Like many of our blogs, pair is an example of a ‘false friend’. This is a type of word to be wary of, as it has the same spelling as an English word, but a totally different meaning. In English, the word ‘pair’ means ‘two of something’. But not in French. In fact, pair has several different meanings.
When it’s an adjective, pair means ‘even’. French adjectives normally change spellings change depending on the noun you want to describe. This is called the adjectival agreement. Pair has different spellings when describing different nouns:
- pair (masculine singular)
- pairs (masculine plural)
- paire (feminine singular)
- paires (feminine plural)
Let’s review some examples of pair as an adjective:
un nombre pair an even number
Les nombres pairs peuvent être divisé par deux. Evennumbers can be divided by two.
Normalement, le facteur ne passe que chez nous les jours pairs. Usually, the postman only comes to our house on even-numbered days.
Note that it also has an antonym, impair, meaning ‘odd’ instead of ‘even’.
Sorry to complicate things, but now we need to bring in another grammatical function. Pair is very commonly used as a masculine noun as well as an adjective. As a noun, the translations can be quite different. You might also recognise it from an English term we’ve borrowed from French – ‘au pair’. Let’s look at some examples to illustrate various meanings:
Ces présentations seront notées par vos pairs. These presentations will be marked by your peers.
aller de pair (avec) to go hand in hand (with); to go together (with)
Mes cousines vont travailler au pair en Espagne cet été. My cousins are going to work as au pairs in Spain this summer.
la Chambre des pairs (France) the Chamber of peers (in a parliamentary context – the House of Lords is roughly the UK equivalent, although the French ‘peers’ are now defunct)
We didn’t want to let you leave without a little bit of bonus trivia. At the start of our blog, we explained how the adjective and masculine noun pair is a false friend of the English word ‘pair’. But funnily enough, the correct French equivalent isn’t too far off the same spelling!
paire(f) pair
une paire de lunettes a pair of glasses
une paire de chaussures a pair of shoes
After reading our blog, we hope that you feel more confident in using pair. Remember that learning French goes hand in hand with practising French, so we hope to see you here for another word next week!
