How to translate French words beginning with É

If you’re reading this blog, chances are you can speak English. And if you can speak English, you have a huge advantage over everyone else when it comes to learning French.

Why? Because around 30% of English words are the same - or nearly the same - in French. As we’ve pointed out elsewhere, by learning a few common patterns that determine how French words translate into English, you can instantly translate thousands of words. Words that end in -ité in French (like la société) usually end in '-ity' in English, for instance, while French words ending in -ment (such as rapidement) often end in '-ly' when they cross the Channel.

Not all these patterns are found at the ends of words, however. One common pattern that many learners aren't familiar with is that a good number of words which begin with é in French actually begin with s in English. Because these letters are so dissimilar, and because they appear at the start of words, learners often don't make the connection between the rest of the word and its translation. But once you know the pattern, you'll be able to translate many of these words automatically simply by swapping é for 's'.

Let's take a look at how common é words translate into English.

Each of the words in the table above originally derived from Latin. École and 'school' both, for example, trace their ancestry back to the Latin schola. English, like other languages such as German and Italian, retained the 's', while French dropped it.

The reason is that early French speakers found it difficult to pronounce these words, which, you'll notice, all begin with digraphs (two consonants strung together). To ease the pronunciation of these words, speakers inserted what is known as a prothetic vowel at the start of the word: e. Somewhere towards the middle of the first millennium, the word schola became, for the French, escola.

As the French language evolved, the s was eventually dropped in many cases in favour of a longer emphasis on the e. That's why it now carries an acute accent, and why the French now say école.

Struggling to understand the difference between e and é?

Check out Alexa's helpful tutorial: