French Verb Conjugator

How French verb conjugation works

A French verb changes its ending for each person (je, tu, il, nous, vous, ils) and each tense. Simple tenses are one word (je parle, je parlais, je parlerai); compound tenses use the auxiliary avoir or être plus the past participle (j'ai parlé, je suis parti).

Most of the work is in a few patterns. Learn the regular endings of each group, the verbs that take être, and the handful of very common irregular verbs (être, avoir, aller, faire, pouvoir, vouloir, savoir, devoir, venir, prendre) and you can conjugate almost any sentence.

The three verb groups

Verbs conjugated with être

In compound tenses, most verbs use avoir. About twenty verbs of movement or change of state use être, along with their derivatives: aller, venir, arriver, partir, entrer, sortir, monter, descendre, naître, mourir, rester, tomber, retourner, passer, devenir, revenir, rentrer, décéder (English speakers remember them as DR MRS VANDERTRAMP). All reflexive verbs also use être: je me suis levé. With être, the past participle agrees with the subject: elle est partie, ils sont arrivés.

Monter, descendre, sortir, rentrer, retourner and passer take avoir when they have a direct object: elle est sortie, but elle a sorti la poubelle.

aller, venir, arriver, partir, rester, tomber, naître, mourir, devenir, revenir, monter, descendre, sortir, rentrer, retourner, passer, remonter, entrer

The 1990 spelling reform

The 1990 spelling rectifications, approved by the Académie française, allow simpler spellings. They are optional: both the traditional and the new spelling are correct, and French schools teach both.

For verbs they mean: no circumflex on i and u where it doesn't distinguish words (il connait, il parait, connaitre); è in the future and conditional of verbs like céder (je cèderai); and è for -eler and -eter verbs other than appeler, jeter and their derivatives (il étiquète, il ruissèle). The conjugator shows the traditional spelling first and labels the 1990 spelling.

Common conjugation mistakes

The 300 most common French verbs

Ranked by frequency in the Lexique 4.1 corpus. Every other verb works in the search box.

How the conjugator works

1. The conjugator knows 80 conjugation models: the regular -er and -ir patterns, every spelling change of -er verbs (ç, ge, è, é → è, -ll-, -tt-, y → i) and 72 models for the 3rd group and the irregular verbs. Each verb in the list points to its model.
2. The verb list and frequencies come from Lexique 4.1, a French lexical database. Each of the 5,061 verbs was assigned the model that reproduces its full conjugation in Wiktionary.
3. Every release is tested: all forms of every verb are compared with Wiktionary (100% of the 1,000 most frequent verbs match, except a dozen where Wiktionary disagrees with Larousse and the Académie française and we follow the dictionaries), and the models are checked against conjugation tables written by hand from standard grammar references.
4. Compound tenses, pronouns, elision (j'aime, qu'il), negative and question forms, reflexive pronouns and agreement with être are built from rules, so they work the same for every verb.

Rare and archaic verbs (choir, gésir, ouïr…) are not included rather than shown partly wrong. Where references disagree, the conjugator shows the form standard grammars recommend and labels accepted variants. It conjugates verbs; it doesn't check whether a sentence uses the right tense.

Frequently asked questions