Adjectifs en -é/-i/-u (participe passé)

A huge number of French adjectives in everyday use look identical to past participles: fatigué (tired), fermé (closed), cassé (broken), cuit (cooked), fini (finished), perdu (lost), construit (built). They are not coincidences — they are past participles that have stepped into adjective territory and now lead a double life as both verbal forms and adjectives. Knowing which life a given form is leading at the moment matters because the agreement rules are different. With avoir + past participle, the form is verbal and follows a strict (and often invisible) rule about preceding direct objects. With être + past participle describing a state, the form is acting like an adjective and agrees with its subject the way grand or intelligent would. This page lays out how to recognize the adjectival use, when to apply it, and how to keep it straight from the verbal use.

The form: same as the past participle

Most French past participles end in one of three vowels:

• -é for -er verbs: aimer → aimé, fermer → fermé, casser → cassé, fatiguer → fatigué.
• -i for -ir verbs: finir → fini, choisir → choisi, partir → parti.
• -u for -re verbs and many irregulars: perdre → perdu, vendre → vendu, vouloir → voulu, voir → vu.

A handful of irregulars end in -t or -s (ouvrir → ouvert, faire → fait, mettre → mis, prendre → pris). Whatever the ending, when the form acts as an adjective, it follows the regular four-form agreement: feminine adds -e, plural adds -s.

For the -é group the masculine and feminine sound the same; for -t endings (ouvert, ouverte) the feminine wakes up the consonant and changes the pronunciation; for -i and -u the feminine adds a silent -e that surfaces only in writing.

The verb / adjective distinction

The same form can appear in two completely different syntactic structures. The verb form occurs in compound tenses (passé composé, plus-que-parfait, futur antérieur…) where it is preceded by an auxiliary, avoir or être. The adjective occurs after être (or another copular verb like sembler, paraître, devenir) and describes a state of the subject.

The trick is that être + past participle can be either of two things:

• A passive verb form describing an action: La maison a été construite en 1950 (The house was built in 1950) — focus on the building event.
• An adjectival use describing a state: La maison est construite en pierre (The house is (made of) stone) — focus on what the house is now.

In both cases the participle agrees with the subject (because être triggers subject agreement either way), so this distinction is invisible in writing — but it shapes how you understand and translate the sentence.

The first sentence describes a state, with no implied agent. The second is a passive: someone (the caretaker) carried out the action. The third uses être as the auxiliary of a compound tense — the participle still agrees with the subject because the auxiliary is être, but no one would call arrivés an adjective; it's the verb of the sentence.

Avoir + past participle vs. être + past participle

This is where the agreement rules diverge.

With avoir: agreement only with a preceding direct object

When the auxiliary is avoir, the past participle is squarely a verb form. It does not agree with the subject and it does not agree with a direct object that follows it. It only agrees with a direct object that comes before it in the sentence — a rare configuration in everyday speech.

In the second sentence, the direct-object pronoun l' stands for Marie and comes before the past participle, triggering feminine agreement: vue. This rule is purely orthographic in many cases (the pronunciation of vu and vue is the same), but it's a hallmark of careful writing. See the dedicated page on avoir agreement for the full machinery.

With être (state): adjective agreement with the subject

When the auxiliary is être and the participle describes a state, the form is functioning as an adjective. It agrees with the subject in gender and number — exactly like grand, fatigué, intelligent.

Notice that none of these have a recoverable agent. Nobody is doing the action right now; we are describing how the subject is. That is the test for an adjectival past participle.

The action vs. state contrast

The clearest way to see the distinction is to put two near-identical sentences side by side and ask whether the focus is on an action or a state.

In the first, avoir is the auxiliary and maison is a following direct object — no agreement. In the second, être is the auxiliary in a passive construction; the focus is on the building event but the participle still agrees with the subject because être demands it. In the third, the focus is on the present state of the house — what it is, not what was done to it. Here construite is functioning as an adjective; you could replace it with another adjective like belle or ancienne without changing the structure.

The first sentence implies a one-time event. The second describes a property the car has right now. Propre is a non-participle adjective, and it slots into the same syntactic position that lavée can occupy when it's interpreted as a state.

A B2 nuance: être en train d'être vs être + participle

In passives, French has different ways to clarify whether the action is happening, has happened, or is a settled state.

• La voiture est lavée. Ambiguous in isolation, but usually a state (The car is clean).
• La voiture est en train d'être lavée. Action in progress (The car is being washed).
• La voiture vient d'être lavée. Just-completed action (The car has just been washed).
• La voiture a été lavée hier. Past completed action (The car was washed yesterday).

Because plain être + past participle tends to drift toward a stative reading, French speakers reach for these alternative constructions when they need to insist that something is currently happening or just happened.

Past participles that have fully become adjectives

Some past-participle adjectives are so entrenched that French speakers no longer feel them as participles. They appear before the noun, take comparison (plus + adjectif), and pair with adverbs like très.

In all of these, you can replace the participle-derived adjective with a different one (très content, vraiment beau, tellement difficile, totalement nouveau) without changing the structure. That's the strongest evidence the form is now operating as a pure adjective.

English speakers' instinct: usually right

English does the same thing — the door is closed, the cake is finished, the children are tired — and the adjectival reading carries over. Where English speakers go astray is when the participle ends in -é (the most common ending), because it sounds the same in masculine and feminine and the agreement is invisible. You may forget to add the silent -e and -s in writing.

The fact that fermé and fermées are pronounced identically does not excuse the spelling. Train yourself to write the agreement even when you can't hear it.

Common Mistakes

Key takeaways

A past participle on its own can play either of two roles. As part of a compound tense with avoir, it is verbal and only agrees with a preceding direct object. As part of an être construction describing a state, it is adjectival and agrees with the subject the way an ordinary adjective would. The same form looks identical in both roles, so you have to read context to know which agreement rule applies. The good news: the adjectival use is closest to English instincts, and once you commit to writing the silent -e and -s every time even when you can't hear them, you will have the agreement right far more often than not.