Prepostion

List of French prepositions

On the previous page, we introduced the definition of preposition. Essentially, they are a small set of special "connecting" words that express the relationship between one noun and another. On this and subsequent pages, I give what is hopefully a reasonably comprehensive list of prepositions in French.

"Basic" prepositions

If you're a relative beginner, then I recommend that you start by learning the following prepositions with the usual English equivalents shown. As in English, the actual choice of a preposition can be highly idiomatic. For example, when people say have a beer on me or I'm waiting on a Big Mac and fries, the preposition on doesn't have its basic meaning of "on top of"— it's essentially the preposition that speakers have got used to using in these cases for no especially good reason. So you can imagine that in other languages, the choice of the equivalent of on in these cases would also vary somewhat.
What we give here, then, are essentially the equivalents of the preposition when it has what we might see as its "basic" meaning.

Table 1: "basic" prepositions in French.

French preposition	Common English equivalent	Comments
à	at, in	à+le>au; à+les>aux
après	after
avant	before
avec	with
chez	at/to ...'s house/place; on/from the premises of, from/at ...'s (with a company name)	For example: chez moi = at my place; je passe chez toi = I'll come round to your place; je l'ai acheté chez Darty = I bought it at Darty('s)
contre	against
dans	in(side)	&bnsp;
de	of, from	de+le>du, de+les>des
depuis	since, from	Also translates English for when used to indicate a continuing action, e.g. I've been working for two days = je travaille depuis deux jours
derrière	behind
devant	in front of, outside (the front of)
en	in	Used mainly with feminine countries and certain figurative expressions
entre	between, among
envers	towards	The preposition envers means "towards" as in "I was kind towards him"; when talking about physical motion towards something, or progress towards a solution, vers is used.
environ	about, approximately	Used postpositionally about a third of the time, e.g. about 30 people can be either environ 30 personnes or 30 personnes environ.
par	by, through
pendant	during	Also used to mean "for" with a past duration of time.
pour	for
sans	without
sauf	except
selon	according to, depending on
sous	under(neath)
sur	on
vers	towards	Also used with dates to mean "in around...", "circa...". See also the preposition envers (above).

Other French prepositions

As you might have gathered, that's not the full story. Beyond the prepositions above, French has a number of others, at least some of which you will probably need to get to grips with sooner or later:

• various less "basic" prepositions which are nonetheless reasonably common in everyday writing such as notices, newspaper articles etc;
• various compound ("complex") prepositions, consisting of several words which together work as though they were a single preposition;
• a few rare or archaic prepositions, which you will probably only come across if translating, say, legal or other specialised texts.