Pleuvoir: Full Verb Reference

Pleuvoir is one of the very first verbs French children learn — il pleut /il plø/ is exactly it is raining, with the same dummy it-subject English uses. Like falloir, pleuvoir is defective: it has no first-person, second-person, or plural forms in its literal weather sense. There is no *je pleus, no *nous pleuvons. The il is grammatical filler — there is no entity actually doing the raining.

Where pleuvoir gets interesting is in the figurative extension. When things "rain down" on someone — compliments, criticisms, blows, missiles — pleuvoir unlocks its plural and starts behaving like a regular verb. Les compliments pleuvent (the compliments are pouring in). This page covers both modes, every form in the paradigm, and the famous orthographic homonymy of il a plu, which is identical for pleuvoir (it rained) and plaire (he/she liked it).

A defective verb in the literal sense

Pleuvoir in its weather meaning is monovalent and impersonal: there is no subject argument that could be a person, an animal, or a thing. The rain itself is what falls, but French does not use la pluie as a subject in the canonical construction (*la pluie pleut is ungrammatical). Instead, the dummy il fills the syntactic subject slot and the verb stays in third-person singular.

That gives a paradigm with exactly one form per tense: il pleut in the present, il pleuvait in the imparfait, and so on. The forms are not "rare" — they are simply the only ones available.

The simple tenses

Présent de l'indicatif

The pronunciation /plø/ has the rounded front vowel that English lacks. The closest English approximation is the u of flute with rounded lips — but you'll need to listen to native speech to get it right.

The idiom il pleut des cordes is the standard French equivalent of it's raining cats and dogs — used constantly, fully idiomatic.

Imparfait

Il pleuvait describes ongoing rain in a past scene — the typical imparfait function for setting up background.

Passé simple (literary)

Il plut /il ply/ is the literary past simple. Identical in spelling to il plut from plaire (he/she pleased — passé simple), which is a real ambiguity in literary writing. Context always disambiguates.

Futur simple

The future stem pleuvr- takes the regular -a ending. Pronounced /pløvʁa/.

Conditionnel présent

Subjonctif présent

Triggered by another subjunctive context: bien que, avant que, je crains que, pour que, etc.

Participles

• Participe passé: plu (invariable in the impersonal use)
• Participe présent: pleuvant — used only metaphorically or in elevated style
• Gérondif: en pleuvant — vanishingly rare; not a form to actively produce

The participe présent pleuvant exists but is essentially confined to literary or figurative contexts. You will not need to produce it in everyday speech.

The compound tenses

Pleuvoir uses avoir as its auxiliary. The participle plu is invariable in the impersonal weather sense.

Passé composé

avoir (présent, 3sg) + plu

Il a plu describes a completed past rainfall.

Plus-que-parfait

avoir (imparfait, 3sg) + plu

Futur antérieur

avoir (futur, 3sg) + plu

The famous il a plu ambiguity

This is one of the classic homonymies in French. The form il a plu is the passé composé of two completely different verbs:

• Pleuvoir (to rain): il a plu = it rained
• Plaire (to please / be liked): il a plu = he was pleasing / he was a hit / they liked him

Both verbs share the participle plu. Both use avoir. So the form is identical.

The disambiguation is always contextual. Three reliable cues:

1. Subject pattern. Pleuvoir takes only the dummy il. Plaire can take any subject (ça a plu, les enfants ont plu aux invités, votre proposition a plu au directeur). If the subject is anything other than the bare dummy il with no antecedent, you are looking at plaire.
2. Indirect object. Plaire takes a à-marked indirect object (plaire à quelqu'un — to be liked by someone). Pleuvoir takes nothing. Il a plu au public must be plaire (the film pleased the audience); il a plu with no further argument is almost always pleuvoir.
3. Topic. If the surrounding sentences are about weather, you have pleuvoir. If they are about a film, a meal, or a person's behavior, you have plaire.

The second example is subtle: il there refers back to ton dessert (a dislocation construction). Plaire à is taking il (= ton dessert) as its real subject, with the topic introduced at the end. This is a normal conversational French pattern.

Figurative pleuvoir — third-person plural unlocked

When pleuvoir is used metaphorically — when blows, compliments, accusations, missiles, or any countable items "rain down" — it becomes a regular verb with a real subject, and the third-person plural becomes available.

In this figurative mode, pleuvoir takes whatever subject the metaphor calls for, and conjugates accordingly: les insultes pleuvent, les balles pleuvaient, les coups ont plu. The first-person and second-person are still avoided (you don't say *je pleus) — the metaphor is generally about external events showering onto someone.

The weather-impersonal system

Pleuvoir is the most prominent member of a small family of weather impersonals. Only some of them are dedicated weather verbs; others use faire with a noun or adjective as a periphrastic construction.

The English speaker's instinct to say "the weather is X" works in French only with le temps est X — and even that is less idiomatic than the il fait construction. Il fait beau is how you say "the weather is nice."

Comparison with English

The good news for English speakers: il pleut maps almost perfectly onto it is raining. Both languages use a dummy it-subject; both use a single verb; both treat the rain as the verb itself rather than as an argument. This is one of the rare grammatical alignments between the two languages.

Three points of friction:

1. Pleuvoir doesn't mean to be raining — just to rain. French has no separate progressive; il pleut covers both it rains and it is raining. Context decides. Quand il pleut, je reste à la maison = when it rains, I stay home (habit). Regarde, il pleut = look, it's raining (right now).

2. The figurative extension takes pleuvoir into territory English does not always grant to rain. English does say insults rained down, but French uses this much more freely: les compliments pleuvent, les questions pleuvaient, les coups ont plu. If you find yourself reaching for "to pour" or "to come flooding in" in English, pleuvoir often works in French.

3. The il a plu / plaire ambiguity has no English parallel. When you write il a plu, you have to make sure context disambiguates. Reading French, you have to be alert to which verb is in play.

Common Mistakes

Mistake 1: Using pleuvoir in the first or second person literally.

Mistake 2: Using être as the auxiliary.

Mistake 3: Confusing plu (pleuvoir/plaire) with pleut in writing.

Mistake 4: Making plu agree with a feminine subject in the figurative use.

Mistake 5: Saying il fait pluie by analogy with il fait beau.

Key takeaways

Pleuvoir is defective in its literal weather sense: only third-person singular forms with the dummy il. The frequency-weighted core is six forms: il pleut (present), il pleuvait (imparfait), il a plu (passé composé), il pleuvra (futur), il pleuvrait (conditional), qu'il pleuve (subjunctive).

In its figurative sense — things "raining down" — pleuvoir unlocks the third-person plural and behaves like a regular verb: les compliments pleuvent, les balles pleuvaient. This is a productive metaphor in French.

The participle plu is identical to the participle of plaire (to please). The form il a plu is genuinely ambiguous in isolation; context disambiguates. If you see il a plu à + person, it's almost always plaire. If you see il a plu with no further argument, or with a sur-phrase, it's pleuvoir.

For English speakers, il pleut maps cleanly to it is raining — the dummy-it construction is the same in both languages. The harder lift is internalizing that there is no je pleus, no nous pleuvons, in normal usage. Pleuvoir simply doesn't go there.