For this week’s edition of our French vocabulary blog, we’re looking at the French verb ranger.
You can learn how to pronounce this word correctly by listening to the audio clip below:
Be careful with the translation here – it’s very easy to immediately try to compare French words to the same words we already know in English. In this case you might be thinking about a ‘ranger’, but remember we’re studying a verb (a doing word) and not a noun (a naming word) in this case.
In English, the verb ranger most commonly translates as to put away, to tidy up, or to arrange. It follows the regular conjugation pattern for -er verbs, without any special rules in different tenses. This should keep things pretty straightforward for you in terms of the grammar.
Despite our earlier warning about trying to find similarities in English, the closest verb we have that could link to the French translation is ‘arrange’. Although this is just one of the translations, remembering this connection might help you to recall the overall meaning of ranger.
Let’s take a closer look at how you might use ranger in some examples:
ranger ses affaires to tidy away/to tidy up one’s things
Il faut que tu ranges ta chambre avant de sortir avec tes amis. You need to tidy your room before you go out with your friends.
J’ai rangé tes livres après avoir trouvé les miens. I put your books away after finding mine.
Il s’agit de ranger les chiffres dans l’ordre numérique. It involves arranging the figures in numerical order.
Est-ce que vous rangerez la voiture à côté de l’hôtel ? Will you be parking your car next to the hotel?
It’s also worth learning about this verb’s reflexive form, se ranger. The English translations for the reflexive form are slightly different from what we’ve already looked at. You might see it used in some set phrases too:
se ranger to belong; to rank in order; to gather; to step aside/get out of the way
se ranger autour de quelque chose to gather around something
se ranger à quelque chose to come round to something (figuratively)
Je me range aux idées de cette politicienne. I’m coming round to the ideas of this politician.
We certainly hope that the information in our blog has helped you to tidy up any loose ends regarding your knowledge of this useful verb. We’ll see you here again next time for another opportunity to improve your French vocabulary.
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.
