Body Parts in French: Essential Words, les yeux, and avoir mal
By Miracle Team ·
Body vocabulary is quietly essential French: it is how you tell a pharmacist what hurts, follow a yoga class, or understand half the idioms in the language (coûter les yeux de la tête — “to cost the eyes from your head”). It also contains French’s weirdest plural and a grammar habit that surprises every English speaker. Here is the full starter kit.
Head first
| French | Sounds like | English |
|---|---|---|
| l’œil | LUH-yuh | eye |
| l’oreille | loh-RAY-yuh | ear |
| le nez | luh NAY | nose |
| la bouche | lah BOOSH | mouth |
| la dent | lah DON | tooth |
| la langue | lah LONG | tongue |
The strangest plural in French: one eye is l’œil, but two eyes are les yeux — “lay ZYUH”. No other noun mutates this completely; it is a thousand-year-old survivor from Latin. Learn l’œil / les yeux as a pair and enjoy owning the language’s best piece of trivia.
La langue does double duty: your tongue and a language — la langue française.
Hands, feet and the engine room
| French | Sounds like | English |
|---|---|---|
| la main | lah MAN (nasal) | hand |
| le bras | luh BRAH | arm |
| la jambe | lah ZHOMB | leg |
| le pied | luh pee-AY | foot |
| le cœur | luh KUR | heart |
| le cerveau | luh sair-VOH | brain |
Watch la main — it looks masculine to everyone (no -e ending) and is stubbornly feminine; it tops every list of gender traps. And le cœur uses that œ sound again: round your lips for “o”, say “e” — the same vowel as sœur.
The l’ words on this page — l’œil, l’oreille — hide their gender behind the apostrophe (œil is masculine, oreille feminine). That is precisely the trap our le or la guide teaches you to defuse, and why the le or la quiz sticks to nouns whose article shows its colors.
”My head hurts” — the avoir mal à formula
French says “I have pain at the…” — and the little word à fuses with the article:
- à + la → J’ai mal à la tête. — My head hurts. (la tête = head)
- à + le → au: J’ai mal au ventre. — My stomach hurts. (le ventre = belly)
- à + les → aux: J’ai mal aux dents. — My teeth hurt. (“oh DON”)
- J’ai mal au dos. — My back hurts. (le dos = back)
Four sentences, and you have also just learned the au/aux contraction that runs through all of French — plus three bonus body words (la tête, le ventre, le dos) that everyday complaints are made of.
The other surprise: with body parts, French usually drops “my” and uses plain le/la — Je me lave les mains (“I wash the hands”), Ferme les yeux (“close the eyes”). The reflexive verb already says whose body it is, so the possessive would be overkill. Do not translate “my” word for word here; French finds it redundant.
Words in motion
- Levez la main ! — Raise your hand! (the classroom classic)
- Il a les yeux bleus. — He has blue eyes.
- Elle parle trois langues. — She speaks three languages.
- Apprendre par cœur — to learn “by heart”, same image as English.
Drill them until they are reflex
The free French body parts game quizzes these words with pictures; spelling mode handles the accents and apostrophes (l’œil is a spelling adventure), and memory mode pairs them until instant. Then use the oldest trick in language class: point and name. Wash your hands — les mains. Brush your teeth — les dents. Your body follows you everywhere; it is the one vocabulary list you can never leave at home. For the sounds that resist (œil, the nasal main, the throaty bras), our pronunciation guide has the mouth mechanics.
Every body part here is in Learn French for Beginners with pictures and native-speaker audio, plus thousands more everyday words. Download it free on Google Play — and learn par cœur the vocabulary you carry with you.