The French expression avoir envie means both “to want to” and “to fancy”. It is used to express desires and wishes. It is formed by combining avoir (to have) followed by the preposition de and a noun or infinitive.
avoir envie de
to want, fancy
Avoir envie de meaning
Example sentences
Envie translates to both wish and desire. Hence, the expression avoir envie de can translate to both “to have the wish to” and “to have the desire to”. Other translations include “to feel like” and “to fancy”.
In our first example sentence, avoir envie de is followed by a noun, un café (a coffee).
J’ai envie d’un café.
I want a coffee.
In our second example sentence, avoir envie de is followed the infinitive boire (to drink) and the noun un café (coffee).
J’ai envie de boire un café.
I want to drink a coffee.
The expression avoir envie de is perfect for expressing wishes or what you’d like to do. Here’s another example.
Sylvie a envie d’aller à la plage.
Sylvie wants to go to the beach.
Avoir envie can also be used in the negation where ne…pas is wrapped around conjugated form or avoir. Again, another translation in our example sentence could be “feel like working”.
Je n’ai pas envie de travailler.
I don’t want to work.
You could equally use avoir envie de to ask somebody why they don’t want to do something. Grammatically, the complete sentence would be: “Tu n’as pas envie?” (You don’t want/feel like it?)
However, in spoken French, the “tu n’as pas” becomes “t’as pas”. Camille at French Today does a great job teaching the subtleties of modern spoken French in her course, À Moi Paris.
T’as pas envie?
You won’t want to?
Discover ore
Check out our post on the expression avoir besoin de (to need) as it’s very similar to avoir envie and follows the exact same grammatical structures.
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