French words used in English, and how common they are
English borrowed thousands of words from French, and most are so settled — table, city, beef — that nobody hears them as French any more. This post is about the other kind: the words English still uses as French, with the accent and a little glamour attached. We measured how often French speakers actually say each of them, and the answer splits them neatly in two: everyday French words that mean something slightly different at home, and words English cherishes that French barely uses at all.
The words, ranked by how often French speakers use them
The rank is each word's place in 318 million words of French film and television dialogue (OpenSubtitles 2018): rank 1 is the most common word in spoken French. The second rank column is where the word falls in our own list of the most common French words, which a learner works through in order.
| Word | Rank in French speech | Rank in our French list | In English | In French |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| encore | 121 | 133 | a performance repeated or added at the end | an ordinary adverb: still, again, more |
| déjà | 168 | 179 | in déjà vu, the sense of having lived a moment before | already |
| genre | 320 | 326 | a category of art | a kind or sort; in speech also a filler, much like English "like" |
| bureau | 419 | 423 | a government office or agency | a desk; an office |
| café | 598 | 598 | a small restaurant | coffee; a café |
| rapport | 669 | 666 | an easy, friendly understanding | a report; a connection (par rapport à, compared with) |
| rendez-vous | 687 | 683 | a meeting place or secret meeting | any appointment, including the doctor's |
| cuisine | 998 | 979 | a style of cooking | a kitchen; cooking |
| souvenir | 1,266 | 1,235 | a keepsake from a trip | a memory; also the verb se souvenir, to remember |
| chauffeur | 2,297 | 2,181 | a paid driver | any driver |
| boutique | 2,603 | 2,457 | a small fashionable shop | any shop |
| fiancée | 2,613 | 2,466 | a woman engaged to be married | the same |
| liaison | 2,673 | 2,521 | a go-between; an affair | a connection or link; an affair; the linking of sounds |
| matinée | 3,599 | 3,337 | an afternoon performance | the morning, first of all; an afternoon show is a second sense |
| chic | 3,620 | 3,356 | stylish | the same |
| protégé | 4,258 | 3,920 | someone guided by a mentor | protected (the participle of protéger); also a protégé |
| ambiance | 4,904 | 4,483 | atmosphere | atmosphere, mood |
| étiquette | 7,595 | 6,783 | rules of polite behaviour | a label; also etiquette |
| cliché | 8,997 | 7,964 | an overused phrase or idea | also a photographic negative, and in older French any photo |
| résumé | 9,396 | 8,317 | a CV (in American English) | a summary; a CV is un CV |
| entrepreneur | 9,751 | 8,600 | a founder of businesses | a business owner, especially in building work |
| façade | 11,866 | 10,242 | a front, real or pretended | the front of a building |
| bourgeois | 13,160 | 11,225 | conventionally middle class | middle class, bourgeois |
| croissant | 14,652 | 12,313 | a crescent-shaped pastry | the pastry; also "growing", the participle of croître |
| avant-garde | 20,993 | 16,778 | experimental art | the same; originally the front of an army |
| cul-de-sac | 23,022 | 18,187 | a dead-end street | the same, though a French street sign says impasse |
| gourmet | 30,015 | not in our 19,884 | a food connoisseur | the same; gourmand, a lover of food, is more common |
| nonchalant | 58,811 | not in our 19,884 | casually calm | the same |
A word that only exists in English as part of a phrase is counted by the word that carries it — déjà, for déjà vu. Phrases are not counted as units.
Everyday French, with a different meaning
8 of these words are in the thousand most common words of spoken French, and they are the ones most likely to trip an English speaker up, because the French meaning is the ordinary one and the English meaning is a narrow slice of it.
- Encore is one of the commonest words in French, and above all an everyday adverb: encore means "still", "again" or "more". Pas encore is "not yet"; encore un café is "another coffee".
- Genre means a kind or type — and in casual speech it is a filler, used much like English "like": c'était, genre, énorme.
- Rapport is a report, or a connection: par rapport à means "compared with". The English sense, an easy understanding between two people, is only one corner of it.
- Rendez-vous is any appointment, romantic or not: you have one with the dentist.
- Bureau is a desk before it is an office.
English words that are rare in French
At the other end, 7 of the words rank below 10,000 in spoken French — words a French speaker knows but seldom says.
- Cul-de-sac exists in French, but a French road sign for a dead end says impasse, which is far more common in speech too: rank 6,646.
- Gourmet is real but rare. The more common word for someone who loves good food is gourmand (rank 18,167), which in English suggests greed.
- Nonchalant, bourgeois and avant-garde are all good French, and all far rarer than their fame in English suggests.
Meanings that moved
Some words are used often in French and mean something else entirely.
- Matinée is first of all "the morning" — toute la matinée, all morning. French has the afternoon show too, but as the second meaning.
- Souvenir is a memory, and it is also the verb "to remember" (se souvenir). The keepsake is the English sense.
- Résumé is a summary. A French job application asks for a CV.
- Étiquette is a label on a jar before it is a code of manners.
- Cliché is also a photographic negative, and in older French any photograph at all.
- Entrepreneur is any business owner, and especially the builder who does your extension.
Why this matters for a learner
The first group is good news. Several of the words English borrowed are among the most useful in French, so you arrive already knowing roughly where they fit — as long as you let the French meaning replace the English one. The second group is a trap for the opposite reason: a word that feels French to an English speaker can sound bookish or dated to a French one.
Either way, frequency is the better guide than familiarity. The 1,000 most common French words are in order, free, and downloadable as a printable PDF or a CSV for Excel or Anki. How far those first thousand words take you is in how long it takes to learn French, and the German equivalent of this list — with some even bigger surprises — is in German words used in English.
The opposite list — French words English has not borrowed, and has no single word for — includes dépaysement and retrouvailles, in words that don't exist in English.
Sources
- Lison, P. & Tiedemann, J. (2016). OpenSubtitles2016: Extracting Large Parallel Corpora from Movie and TV Subtitles. Proceedings of LREC 2016. aclanthology.org
- Dave, H. FrequencyWords: frequency lists from OpenSubtitles 2018, content licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. github.com. The ranks are computed by
scripts/frequency_curves.py; the word list and every meaning in it are written by hand inscripts/frequency_extras.py. - Larousse, Dictionnaire de français: encore, matinée, étiquette, impasse, cliché, entrepreneur.
- Wiktionary: genre, the colloquial filler.