By Marissa Macy Last updated: June 6, 2023

173 Essential French Adjectives with Audio and Example Sentences

Get to know more French adjectives, and you’ll be way more expressive in the language! 

Read on for 173 useful French adjectives, complete with audio pronunciation, conjugation information and example sentences. 

This guide also covers important grammar rules for adjectives, like word order and gender agreement.  

Contents

• General French Adjectives
• French Adjectives for Emotions
• French Adjectives for Describing Personality
• French Adjectives About Appearance
• French Adjectives for Objects and Places
• French Adjectives for Color
• French Adjectives About Relationships
• French Adjectives About Money
• French Adjectives Related to Sound
• Miscellaneous French Adjectives
• Functional French Adjectives
• How to Use French Adjectives
• • Word Order (B-A-N-G-S)
  • • Adjectives Before the Noun
    • Adjectives After the Noun
    • Bonus: Adjectives with Multiple Meanings
  • Gender Agreement 
  • Turning Adjectives into Adverbs
•  

Download: This blog post is available as a convenient and portable PDF that you can take anywhere. Click here to get a copy. (Download)

General French Adjectives

French Adjectives for Emotions

French Adjectives for Describing Personality

French Adjectives About Appearance

French Adjectives for Objects and Places

French Adjectives for Color

French Adjectives About Relationships

French Adjectives About Money

French Adjectives Related to Sound

Miscellaneous French Adjectives

Functional French Adjectives

The following don’t really serve to describe, but they work like adjectives:

These include numerical adjectives, like double and triple . 

French ordinal numbers such as première (first), deuxième (second), troisième (third) can also act as adjectives. 

How to Use French Adjectives

Get these three points down before you start going crazy with the French adjectives above: 

Word Order (B-A-N-G-S)

To be before the noun or to be after the noun? That is the question. 

Adjectives Before the Noun

Remember this nice little acronym: B-A-N-G-S.

Okay, one more thing. We didn’t add this to the acronym, because there’s just no room for an F, unless you want to call it B-FANGS. Functional adjectives like autre (other) and plusieurs (several) also go before the noun. 

Adjectives After the Noun

Start cheering, because most descriptive adjectives go after the noun! Unlike in English, adjectives’ default spot is after the noun in French.

So if we’re talking color, taste, personality, mood, nationality or religious affiliation, then they go after the noun. Basically, when in doubt, just remember BANGS, (or B-FANGS if you’re up for using a rapper name), and in all other cases, tack it after the noun.

Bonus: Adjectives with Multiple Meanings

There are actually French adjectives that completely change meaning based on where you decide to put them.

Here are some of them:

Gender Agreement 

Ah, everyone’s favorite grammar rule: gender agreement! As you know, adjectives need to agree with the noun they are describing. For example, you can have either une vieille pomme  (an old apple) or un vieux yaourt  (an old yogurt).

For a more in-depth discussion on French gender rules, check this post out. For now, let’s just talk adjective rules.

The Easy to Remember Endings

With most adjectives you just tack on an e for feminine, an s for masculine plural and an es for feminine plural. This works with a lot of the common adjectives, like vert/e/s (green) and content/e/s (happy). 

But of course we’ve got some endings that just won’t conform. Here are our rebel endings and what to do with them:

Of course, there are also the exceptions, the ones that change COMPLETELY when you try to make them feminine, such as  beau/belle/beaux/belles (beautiful) or doux/douce/doux/douces (sweet)

You’re likely to come across more exceptions as your French gets more advanced. For the most part, they follow the rules we mentioned before, and these will soon come naturally just from immersion.

Turning Adjectives into Adverbs

Luckily, if you like your language extra-flowery and descriptive, French has adverbs just like English does. Adverbs describe a verb and usually end in ment, kind of like how English adverbs usually end in ly.

Unfortunately, not everything about French adverbs is the same as in English, so let’s hit a few points that will help you use them correctly.

Adjectives You’re Allowed to Turn into Adverbs

So there’s a little differentiation we can make between types of adjectives.

Generally speaking, you can turn a qualitative adjective into an adverb, but not a classifying adjective.

Kind of like how “beautifully” is a perfectly acceptable adverb in English, but Frenchly is just…not a word.

In addition, just because an adverb exists in English doesn’t mean it does in French. Though there’s usually a word that exists to express it, it may not have been the translation you were trying for in the first place.

Rules and Regulations for the Transformation

Luckily, there aren’t too many exceptions: 

Bref/brève (brief) becomes brièvement  (briefly).

Gentil/gentille (nice) becomes gentiment  (nicely).

And of course, the two adverbs that haunt French learners:

Bon (good) becomes bien  (well).

Meilleur (best) becomes mieux  (best).

Now don’t you forget it again!

It can be difficult to grasp at first, but remember: Practice makes perfect.

You can give yourself a hand by using an app to help you differentiate between your bien and your bon. A program like FluentU, for example, will let you see the words in action through authentic French videos, and will help you remember them with personalized quizzes.

Or, you can listen to this Cliff Notes podcast that goes more in-depth in explaining this concept.

Seriously, next time you have a conversation with your French exchange partner, it should be beautiful with all of these adjectives and adverbs.

There are a lot of rules involving gender and placement, but there are almost no bounds on how much new vocabulary you can derive from them.

Before you know it, you’ll be fluent and using French adjectives like you’ve known the rules your whole life!

Download: This blog post is available as a convenient and portable PDF that you can take anywhere. Click here to get a copy. (Download)