How Do French Vocabulary Lists Work on Lexicogs?
Here is an example of a wordlist that you will find on Lexicogs:
| a child | un enfant |
| brother | le frère |
| daughter | la fille |
| father | le père |
| family | la famille |
You’ll see that each French word given in this list has the words un, le or la preceding them.
Le and la are the French words for ‘the,’ so le père in this list and la mère actually mean ‘the father’ and ‘the mother.’
The words in this list are all nouns, because they name objects, in this case people. French nouns show gender, with père being masculine and mère, of course, being feminine, which is why le changes to la.
However, all nouns in French, even if they do not represent people, have a grammatical gender. For example ‘coat’ is le manteau, (masculine) while a ‘jacket’ is la veste (feminine), so these would appear in a Lexicogs list as follows:
| coat | le manteau |
| jacket | la veste |
In other words, it always makes sense to try and learn the gender of the noun at the same time as learning the word itself, which is why we have them in all our word lists.
While this works for many nouns, some nouns begin with a vowel. In these cases the word for ‘the’ is merged into the word as follows:
le enfant > l’enfant
So now we don’t know whether it is a masculine or feminine word. In this case, we use un in the Lexicogs list instead to show that it is masculine. Un enfant means ‘a child,’ and the un shows it’s masculine. For feminine words, you would see the word une, which is the feminine version of ‘a.’
For example:
| grocery store | une épicerie |
| hypermarket | un hypermarché |
Sometimes, words are shown in the plural and in this case, the word for the is always ‘les.’ This means that we cannot see what gender the noun is, so we use abbreviations in the wordlists, similar to those used in many dictionaries:
| eyes | les yeux (nmpl.) |
This means it is a noun, which is masculine and in its plural form. We would use ‘nfpl’ for a feminine plural noun.
The following abbreviations are used:
| nm. | singular masculine noun |
| nf. | singular feminine noun |
| nmpl. | plural masculine noun |
| nfpl. | plural feminine noun |
