12 French Words English Speakers Use Every Day

The English language has borrowed from French for about a thousand years, and it’s gotten very good at covering its tracks. Some loanwords still wear the origin on their sleeve—rendezvous, croissant, déjà vu, for example. Others got sanded down until nobody hears the French at all.

Most of the words below belong to that second group. Each started as something concrete—a shoe, a bell, a scrap of wool, a bowl of broth—and arrived carrying a story we all quit noticing centuries ago.

1. Dandelion
2. Vinegar
3. Curfew
4. Mortgage
5. Toilet
6. Bureau
7. Denim
8. Restaurant
9. Silhouette
10. Sabotage
11. Cliché
12. Etiquette

Dandelion

The name is a squashed version of the Old French dent de lion, “lion’s tooth,” which reached English in the late 1300s. The teeth are the jagged leaf edges, not the petals. French later dropped it: the ordinary modern word is pissenlit, roughly “wet the bed,” after the plant’s diuretic reputation.

Vinegar

Cut the word in half and you get the recipe. Anglo-French vin (“wine”) plus egre (“sour”) gave vinegre, in English by the early 1300s; continental French had already fused them into vinaigre by about 1200. The sourness went metaphorical, too, which is how you can be full of vinegar without drinking any.

Curfew

From Old French cuevrefeu, literally “cover fire.” A medieval curfew was a bell, rung around 8 or 9 p.m., telling households to bank their hearth embers—no small thing when one spark could take out a street. English adopted it in the early 1300s; the “stay indoors” sense didn’t dominate until the 1800s.

Mortgage

Old French mort gage means “dead pledge,” and the thing that dies is the pledge, not the borrower. The English jurist Edward Coke spelled it out in the 1600s: pay, and the pledge is dead to the lender; default, and the land is dead to you. English took the word in the late 1300s. French kept hypothèque for the lien itself; the loan you actually sign for a house is a prêt immobilier.

Toilet

This one took the longest trip. French toilette is a diminutive of toile, “cloth.” In English it meant a clothes cover (1530s), then the cloth on a dressing table, then the brushes and bottles on it, then the act of grooming, then the dressing room by 1819—and finally, in 1895, the porcelain fixture. That last leap was an American euphemism.

Bureau

Also fabric, originally. Old French burel was a coarse wool used to drape writing desks; by 1316 bureau meant the cloth accounts were tallied on, and by 1361 the table itself. English borrowed the desk in the 1690s, the office by 1720, the government division by 1796—making the FBI distantly named after brown cloth.

Denim

Merriam-Webster and Etymonline both trace it to serge de Nîmes, a twilled fabric from the southern French city. Because that “S” is silent, English wrote serge de Nim before clipping it down to denim in the 1690s. Jean has its own lineage, running through Gene, Middle English for Genoa.

Restaurant

Before it was a room, it was soup. French restaurant is a participle of restaurer, “to restore,” and by 1521, it named a fortifying broth sold to people with delicate constitutions. French didn’t attach the word to the establishment until 1803; English imported the room in 1806.

Silhouette

Étienne de Silhouette lasted about eight months as France’s controller-general of finances in 1759 – long enough for his austerity program to make his name shorthand for anything cheap and stripped down, including a portrait that was just a traced profile. That’s the usual explanation. It reached English by the late 1700s.

Sabotage

You may have heard that French workers threw their wooden shoes into the machinery. They didn’t; Merriam-Webster says flatly there’s no evidence for it. Sabot does mean clog, but the chain runs through saboter, “to clatter around in clogs,” which by 1808 meant botching a job. Émile Pouget gave the word its modern sense in 1897.

Cliché

A cliché was a printing plate—a metal block that stamped out the same image forever, without variation, which is an almost-too-perfect metaphor for a worn-out phrase. The name is thought to imitate the sound of the matrix dropping onto molten metal. English had the printing sense by 1825, the insult by the 1880s.

Etiquette

French étiquette meant a label or ticket, from a root meaning “to stick”—the same root behind ticket. The manners sense took a detour: Spain borrowed the word for its court protocols, the meaning widened there, and France imported it back. English got it in the mid-1700s.