French false friends

False friends - or faux amis, as they’re known in French - are words you might encounter while studying French that look deceivingly familiar. But their actual meaning is quite different from what you would expect. Take a word like ‘librairie’ for instance. Common sense suggests that this word would correspond to ‘library’ in English, but in fact it actually means ‘bookshop’. This is why we call it a ‘false friend’, since it looks, at first glance, like a word you don’t need to look up and remember.

For English speakers, French is full of false friends, owing to the historical, geographical and linguistic ties between the two languages. Some of these are words which have stayed the same or similar in both languages, but their meaning has diverged over time, while others are words which happen to look the same by coincidence. Whatever the reason behind these false friends, it’s important to be aware of them so that you don’t fall into the trap of confidently saying the wrong thing or misinterpreting the meaning of a word in French.

Below you’ll find a list of common false friends in French.