Database Contents


This spoken lexicon consists of 10,000 common French words uttered by native speakers
(one female voice and one male voice).
Recordings are high quality audio files.

Check the pronunciation of
female voiceaccueil, male voiceamer, male voicecynisme, female voiceentendent, male voiceseconds
or of any word you are unsure of.

    The 10,000 words are among those most often used in French. Proper nouns and some foreign words pronounced the French way are also included.

    The French recorded is neither academic nor the language of the street -- it is simply the everyday French you will hear if you come to France.

    As this spoken lexicon is based on written forms, some of the conjugated or inflected forms given here are not found in a conventional dictionary. The sound is simply linked to the written form, so you don't need to know anything about grammar.

    Both written and especially spoken French are full of exceptions. Words pronounced alike are not written alike; words written alike are not always pronounced alike. Pronunciation changes with context. Rules are hard to follow, even broken.
On top of that there are regional accents, features of spoken usage and, of course, borrowings from foreign languages.

    Where necessary, grammatical forms are specified: for example, fils nm s, which is the singular masculine noun (as in, le fils de son père), as opposed to fils nm p, the plural masculine noun (as in, des fils de soie).

    You may notice that the utterances of the two speakers sometimes differ slightly or even clearly. This mirrors common spoken usage. The two pronunciations Saint-Tropez and Saint-Tropez are equally often heard, as are but and but or ananas and ananas.

This resource is intended for those learning French on their own as well as for university language departments and CALL developers.

Technical Information
  • 16 KHz 16-bit digital audio files (WAV format)
  • approx 600 Mb of audio and HTML files
  • Web-based interface
  • 1 CDROM (PC, Mac, Unix compatible)
Other languages are in preparation.
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