French word of the week: net

Welcome back to our word of the week blog, French learners! Today, we’re studying the word net.

To get a sense of how it might sound, you can listen to its pronunciation in our audio clip below:

Net is an adjective, a word used to describe a noun, but it can also be used as an adverb in some cases. French adjectives have different spellings to make them agree with the noun they describe, which means you might see net in various forms:

• The feminine form nette
• The masculine plural form nets
• The feminine plural form nettes

Now, we know that it’s very tempting to immediately assume the meaning of this word, as we have the exact same word in English. However, we must always be wary of words like these, known as false friends. In French, net has nothing to do with a net like you might use in fishing or fabrics – it can be translated along the lines of clear, clean, neat or distinct. You will also already be familiar with the usage of net in terms of ‘net’ profit or ‘net’ weight. We’ll look at some examples after a quick overview of the grammar.

Let’s move on to our examples:

Je touchais un salaire net de € 25.000. I was earning a net salary of 25,000 euros.

Il nous faut une nouvelle télé, l’image n’est plus très nette. We need a new TV, the picture isn’t very sharp anymore.

Si vos idées ne sont pas assez nettes, vous allez rater l’examen. If your ideas are not clear enough, you’re going to fail the exam.

Ma sœur a une écriture nette. My sister has neat handwriting.

Le poids net doit ne pas dépasser vingt kilos. The net weight cannot be above twenty kilos.

s’arrêter net to stop dead/immediately

casser net to snap right off; to break cleanly

net d’impôt after tax

Watch out if you see Net with a capital N, as this changes its meaning and grammatical function. In this sense, it’s a masculine noun meaning the internet:

Mon grand-père a du mal à chercher les infos sur le Net. My grandfather has trouble looking for the news on the internet.

One final point: sometimes you can use adjectives or nouns you know to work out the meanings of related verbs. With net, knowing that it can mean clean or tidy, you could use it to help you translate this verb which has net at its root:

nettoyer to clean; to tidy up; to neaten up

After learning the ins and outs of the word, we hope that the use of net is now very clear to you!

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.