Welcome back to all of our French learners! We’re here to offer you another word of the week. This time, we’ve chosen pile.
As we already have the same word in English, we recommend listening to the audio clip below to hear how to say it in French:
Sometimes we say that words spelled the same in English and French are false friends. This is because they trick us into thinking they have the exact same meanings in both languages…. While‘pile’ in English means a heap of something, pile in French can mean ‘battery’, ‘tails’ of a coin, as well as being an adverb to mean ‘sharply’ or ‘exactly’. But this false friend can be kind sometimes, as pile does also mean ‘pile’ as in ‘heap’ or ‘stack’.
While there are plenty of translation options, this feminine noun usually follows articles like la or une. For more information, visit our Easy Learning French Grammar pages on noun genders, definite articles and indefinite articles.
On this note, we’ll continue with some examples of pile in use as a noun:
Il a laissé une pile d’assiettes sales. He left a pile of dirty plates.
Qui va ranger cette pile de vêtements ? Who’s going to tidy up this pile of clothes?
pile rechargeable rechargeable battery
pile solaire solar-powered battery
Nous devons changer les piles. We have to replace the batteries.
Il faut mettre trois piles dans cette lampe de poche. You need to put three batteries in this torch.
jouer à pile ou face to toss (a coin)
Pile ou face ? Heads or tails? (Note that the natural way to say this in English is ‘heads or tails’, but the literal French translation here would be ‘tails or heads’.)
Now that we’ve covered the noun usage of pile, we can see how you might encounter it as an adverb:
Il est seize heures pile. It’s 4pm exactly / sharp.
On doit partir à six heures pile. We need to leave at six o’clock on the dot.
Elles se sont mariées il y a pile trois mois. They got married exactly three months ago.
Quand j’ai vu le chien, je me suis arrêté pile. When I saw dog, I stopped (the car) just at the right time / stopped dead.
Thank you for reading this week’s blog. Now you’ve got exactly a week to recharge your batteries before coming back here to learn a new word! 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.
