Today we’ll look at commonly used French word, bête. As an adjective bête means both silly and stupid. As a noun it means animal, creature, beast or insect. Tu es bête! You are silly! Let’s jump right into the lesson!
bête
silly, stupid, creature
Word origin
The modern French word bête comes from the Old French beste, which in turn come the Latin bestĭa (beast, animal, creature). The word bête is a classic example of where an -e with a circumflex accent (the little hat) replaces an -s in Old French. This lesson on our site covers the French accent marks in detail.
Example sentences
For this first example sentence, bête simply means “stupid” or “dumb”.
Sylvie trouve que Martin est très bête.
Sylvie finds that Martin is very stupid.
In this second example, the meaning changes to “silly”. We loosely translated “je suis bête” (literally I am silly) to the English expression “silly me”.
Je suis bête : j’ai encore oublié les clés !
Silly me! I forgot my keys again!
As mentioned, bête as a feminine noun translates to beast or animal. The French expression “sale bête“ (literally dirty beast) is used to mean “bad” or “annoying” animal. Hence, the translation “bad dog”.
Sale bête ! Descends !
Bad dog! Get down!
In French, the feminine noun bêtise is related to bête and means silly mistake or error. The expression raconter des bêtises means to “talk nonsense”.
Ah zut ! J’ai encore fait la même bêtise.
Oh shoot! I made the same mistake again!
Conclusion
Et voilà ! You know how to use the French word bête. Now check our lesson covering another fun and useful informal French adjective nul/nulle, which translates to “lousy” or “sucks”.
