False Anglicisms: Words That Look English but Aren't

French has imported English words at an astonishing rate over the last hundred and fifty years, and along the way it has invented a category of word that delights and confuses native English speakers in equal measure: the pseudo-anglicism. These are nouns built from English roots and English-sounding suffixes, but with meanings English itself does not assign. Le smoking is not a habit but a tuxedo. Le footing is not a stadium chant but a jog. Le baby-foot is not a baby's foot but a table-football game. To complicate things further, sitting alongside these inventions are genuine English borrowings (le week-end, le hot-dog) that mean exactly what they appear to mean.

This page maps the territory. We separate the pseudo-anglicisms from the real borrowings, look at why French invented these forms in the first place, and address the surprisingly tangled rules around how to pluralize and gender them. By the end you will recognize the pattern that gives away a pseudo-anglicism on sight, and you will know the dozen or so words that absolutely must be in any serious learner's vocabulary.

What is a pseudo-anglicism?

A pseudo-anglicism is a word that looks English to a French ear but is unattested or means something else in actual English. Most pseudo-anglicisms in French follow a recognizable formula: take an English verb, add the gerund/present-participle ending -ing, and use the result as a noun for the activity, place, or object associated with the verb.

The pattern is so productive that French speakers can coin new pseudo-anglicisms on the fly and be perfectly understood. Le brushing (a blow-dry hairstyling) makes intuitive sense to French speakers because the verb to brush is recognizable and the -ing signals an activity-noun. The fact that no English speaker would ever call a hair appointment "a brushing" is irrelevant — it is now a French word.

The classic pseudo-anglicisms

The pseudo-anglicisms below are completely standard in French and unavoidable in everyday conversation. The vast majority are masculine (the default for English borrowings) and take a regular -s plural in writing; the rare feminine cases are flagged.

Why do these exist?

Two historical forces produced the pseudo-anglicism. The first was prestige borrowing in the late 19th and early 20th centuries: English signified modernity, sport, and Anglo-Saxon sophistication. French speakers borrowed the look of English without always borrowing actual English words. Le smoking comes from "smoking jacket," abbreviated to just "smoking" — a real English term clipped and recycled. Le footing dates from the 1880s and was probably formed by analogy with sport-words like le sprinting or le cycling; modern English uses jogging (which French has also adopted: le jogging now coexists with le footing and slightly leans toward describing the outfit one wears).

The second force is morphological productivity: once -ing became a recognizable French suffix meaning "activity associated with X," speakers could attach it freely. Le brushing, le relooking, le forcing — none of these existed in English at the time French speakers were using them. They are French words wearing English costumes.

Real anglicisms (they mean what they say)

Not every English-looking French noun is a trap. Many are straightforward borrowings that mean exactly what an English speaker would expect. The catch is they take French gender (almost always masculine) and French pronunciation, and they often look slightly French-ified in spelling.

The case of le smoking — anatomy of a pseudo-anglicism

Le smoking deserves a closer look because it illustrates how pseudo-anglicisms emerge. In late-Victorian England, men wore a smoking jacket — a velvet jacket worn after dinner, in the smoking room, while smoking. By the 1880s the garment had migrated to French aristocratic circles, where the noun phrase smoking jacket was clipped to its first element. The French kept le smoking and assigned it a slightly elevated meaning: not just any after-dinner jacket, but the formal evening wear worn to balls, weddings, and galas. Modern English calls this garment a tuxedo (American) or dinner jacket (British). The French word is now its own thing, with no exact English equivalent.

The pattern repeats elsewhere: le pressing (from the verb to press via the steam-pressing of clothes); le brushing (from the action of using a round brush during a blow-dry); le forcing (from forcing one's way, applying pressure). Each represents an English root that French has lifted, recontextualized, and re-coined into a noun.

Pluralization rules for anglicisms

Most anglicisms in French follow regular French pluralization: add -s. The 1990 spelling reform encouraged this systematically.

A small set retains its English plural form, especially in informal usage and especially with words that are heard often as a pair:

The rule of thumb: in formal writing follow the 1990 reform and add -s; in journalistic and everyday writing, both forms circulate and neither will be marked wrong.

A note on register and Académie française pushback

The Académie française, the official guardian of the French language, regularly publishes alternatives to anglicisms: le mot-dièse for le hashtag, l'égoportrait for le selfie, le courriel for l'email, l'ordiphone for le smartphone. With rare exceptions, these alternatives fail to take hold in metropolitan France, though they are often adopted in Canadian French and government documents.

Quebec is more aggressive about replacing anglicisms with French-built equivalents: Quebecers say le stationnement for le parking, la fin de semaine for le week-end, le magasinage for le shopping, le pourriel for le spam. A learner planning to spend time in Montreal should know both registers.

Pronunciation pitfalls

Pseudo-anglicisms and real anglicisms are pronounced French-style: the -ing is roughly [iŋ] with a French nasal feel rather than the English velar nasal, and the stress falls on the last syllable as in any French word.

• le parking → [paʁ.kiŋ], stressed on -king
• le smoking → [smɔ.kiŋ]
• le week-end → [wi.kɛnd], with French -end pronounced as the English -end

Initial h is generally not pronounced, but words borrowed from English keep an "aspirate h" that blocks elision: le hot-dog (not l'hot-dog), le hold-up, le hamburger. This is a small but visible marker that the word came from English.

Common Mistakes

Key takeaways

Pseudo-anglicisms are not learner errors to be corrected — they are real, productive features of modern French that any serious speaker must master. The -ing ending is the clearest tell: when you see it on a French noun, ask whether the meaning is straightforwardly the English activity (le shopping, le marketing) or has been semantically reshaped (le smoking, le footing, le pressing). When in doubt, look the word up rather than assume — and if you are listening to a Quebecois speaker, expect a different vocabulary entirely, with native French equivalents replacing the anglicisms you would hear in Paris.