French word of the week: rien

In this week’s word of the week blog, where we study a useful French word, we’re going to look at… nothing. That’s right, nothing! As today’s word is the French word for ‘nothing’, rien.

If you’d like to hear the French pronunciation of rien, listen to our audio clip below:

We already mentioned the translation of the word, nothing, but it can also mean not … anything. We’ll quickly study the grammar before diving into some examples of rien in action.

Rien is a pronoun, but more specifically an indefinite pronoun. The word ‘indefinite’ might give you a bit of a clue as to what it means, as we use indefinite pronouns to refer to people or things without saying exactly who or what they are.

For more about pronouns, it’s worth taking a read through the information in our Easy Learning French Grammar section on pronouns.

Are you ready to see how it all works? You’ll notice in our examples below that we can use rien as part of a negative statement, using the structure ne + verb + rien, as well as use the word on its own or in other ways:

Je n’ai rien acheté au marché aux puces. I didn’t buy anything / I bought nothing at the flea market.

autant ne rien dire best to say nothing; best not to say anything

Cela n’avait rien à voir avec toi ! This had nothing to do with you!

Si elles gagnaient au loto, elles ne partageraient rien avec nous. If they won the lottery, they would share nothing / wouldn’t share anything with us.

Mes élèves ne savent rien de l’histoire du quatorzième siècle. My pupils don’t know anything / know nothing about fourteenth-century history.

Il ne prendra rien qu’un verre d’eau. He’ll have nothing but a glass of water; He’ll only / just have a glass of water.

rien du tout nothing at all

rien d’autre nothing else

rien de plus / moins nothing more / less

rien de mieux nothing better

Ça ne sert à rien. It’s useless; There’s no point.

« Merci beaucoup. » – « De rien. » “Thanks so much.” – “No problem”.

« Qu’est-ce que tu viens de me dire ? » – « Rien. » “What did you just say to me?” – “Nothing”.

Congratulations on adding another French word to your vocabulary! While learning a new language, it can sometimes feel like nothing is easy to make sense of, but we hope that our blog has helped.

Written by Holly Tarbet, freelance copywriter and editor.

All opinions expressed on this blog are those of the individual writers, and do not necessarily reflect the opinions or policies of Collins, or its parent company, HarperCollins.