Which Conjugation New Verbs Join

When French needs a new verb — for a new technology, a borrowed concept, a slang innovation — it almost never asks which conjugation to use. The answer is automatic: the new verb joins the 1er groupe (-er). Googler, tweeter, scroller, télécharger, optimiser — all -er. The 2e groupe (-ir with -iss-) is essentially closed to new members. The 3e groupe is fully shut. Understanding why this happens reveals a lot about how French verbs are organized as a system, and it gives you a powerful predictive shortcut: when you encounter or invent a new verb, you can conjugate it confidently from day one.

This page explains the productivity hierarchy of French verb classes, walks through the modern -er-only borrowings, and shows why the architecture of the language reinforces this preference.

What "productivity" means in linguistics

A linguistic class is productive if speakers spontaneously assign new items to it. The English plural -s is productive: ask any English speaker how to pluralize zorch and they will say zorches, not zorchen. The plural -en (as in children, oxen) is unproductive — no one invents spoonen.

French verb classes work the same way. The 1er groupe is productive — speakers reach for it without thinking when they need a new verb. The other groups are not. This asymmetry is so strong that it has become a kind of grammatical reflex: ask a French speaker to verbify ghost (in the dating sense), and they will produce ghoster, not ghostir and certainly not ghostre.

The 1er groupe absorbs almost every new verb

Tech and digital life

The internet generation has produced a torrent of new -er verbs in French, almost all of them direct borrowings from English with a French infinitive ending tacked on:

Social and behavioural slang

The same pattern dominates everyday slang and youth language. New verbs come in constantly, and they all conjugate as -er:

Brand-name verbs

French routinely turns proper nouns and brand names into -er verbs. Kleenex becomes un kleenex; the verb to wipe with a tissue doesn't exist as a common form, but compare scotcher (from the Scotch tape brand) which means "to tape" or, figuratively, "to glue someone in place with shock":

Borrowings from other Romance languages

When French borrows from Italian or Spanish, the same rule applies — the verb becomes -er regardless of its source class:

• Italian italianiser (to italianise) and italien → italianiser show the borrowing-into-derivational pattern.
• From Italian musical and culinary vocabulary: cuisiner (cook), crémer (to add cream) — all -er.
• Older borrowings: manger (from Latin manducare), chanter (from Latin cantare) — both arrived through the original -ARE → -er pipeline.

Productive derivational suffixes funnel into -er

French has two highly productive verb-deriving suffixes, both of which produce -er verbs exclusively:

-iser (corresponds to English -ize / -ise)

Used to form verbs from adjectives or nouns expressing transformation. The result is always an -er verb:

• moderne → moderniser (to modernise)
• numérique → numériser (to digitise)
• optimal → optimiser (to optimise)
• réel → réaliser (to realise / to bring about)
• standard → standardiser (to standardise)
• vapeur → vaporiser (to vaporise / to spray)

-ifier (corresponds to English -ify)

Same logic, with a slightly more elevated or technical flavour:

• simple → simplifier (to simplify)
• clair → clarifier (to clarify)
• code → codifier (to codify)
• justice → justifier (to justify)
• quantité → quantifier (to quantify)

Both suffixes are still actively producing new verbs. Recent additions include gamifier (to gamify), uberiser (to uberise — disrupt with a platform model), and radicaliser (to radicalise, in the modern political sense).

The 2e and 3e groupes are essentially closed

The 2e groupe (-ir with -iss-)

This class is mostly closed to new coinings, but it remains marginally productive in one narrow domain: verbs derived from colour adjectives, which describe gradual change:

• rouge → rougir (to redden / blush)
• jaune → jaunir (to yellow)
• blanc → blanchir (to whiten / become white)
• vert → verdir (to turn green)
• noir → noircir (to blacken)
• bleu → bleuir (to turn blue)

A few non-colour 2e-groupe verbs were coined relatively recently — rajeunir (to make/look younger), vieillir (to age) — but these too belong to a closed semantic field of "gradual change in state". You will not find a 21st-century neologism in the 2e groupe. Modern speakers do not invent new -ir/-iss- verbs the way they invent new -er verbs.

The 3e groupe

This is the closed class. No new 3e-groupe verbs are added in modern French. The group contains roughly 350 high-frequency verbs (être, avoir, aller, faire, prendre, voir, savoir, pouvoir, vouloir, devoir, dire, partir, venir...), almost all inherited directly from Latin via Old French. They are the linguistic equivalent of strong verbs in English (sing/sang/sung): historical leftovers that resist regularisation precisely because their high frequency keeps their irregular forms in active use.

When a learner encounters a new French verb in the 3e groupe, that verb is centuries old, not a recent borrowing. There is no such thing as a borrowed 3e-groupe verb in modern French.

Why -er wins: four reinforcing reasons

1. Phonological flexibility

The -er ending attaches cleanly to almost any consonant cluster. Scrollr would be unsayable; scroller slips effortlessly off the tongue. Every English consonant cluster — str-, scr-, gh-, gh-st- — can become a French verb stem simply by adding -er. The -ir endings are pickier; scrollir sounds awkward, and the -iss- infix in conjugated forms (scrollissons?) is even worse.

2. Latin inheritance

The -er class descends from the Latin first conjugation in -are (amare → aimer, cantare → chanter, manducare → manger). Already in Latin, -are was the productive class — the home of new and borrowed verbs. French simply continued the pattern. The 2e groupe descends from Latin -ire and the 3e groupe from a mix of -ere and -ire irregulars; both were already less productive in Latin.

3. Network effects

Productivity reinforces itself. Because -er is the productive class, speakers expect new verbs to be -er. This expectation makes -er feel more "natural" for novel forms, which makes speakers reach for it again. After a few generations, the pattern becomes self-perpetuating: -er is productive because it is productive.

4. Conjugational simplicity

The -er paradigm is the most regular and predictable in French. Four of the six present-tense forms are pronounced identically (je parle, tu parles, il parle, ils parlent all /paʁl/). The participe passé is uniformly -é. The futur is uniformly infinitive + endings. This predictability lowers the cognitive cost of inventing or borrowing new -er verbs: you don't have to think about how they will conjugate.

Spelling subtleties for borrowed -er verbs

When English verbs become French -er verbs, French must decide what to do with the original spelling. Some patterns:

• Kept as in English, with -er added. Tweeter, scroller, screenshotter, ghoster. Pronunciation is anglicised: /twite/, /skʁɔle/, /skʁinʃote/, /goste/.
• Adapted spelling. Tagger alongside taguer (the latter recommended by the Académie française); blogger alongside bloguer. Both forms are seen.
• Existing French verb adopts the new meaning. Charger already meant "to load"; télécharger extended it to mean "download". No borrowing was needed.

The Académie française occasionally proposes French alternatives (courriel for email, clavarder for chatter), but speakers usually keep the borrowed -er form for digital activities.

Register: how slang -er verbs feel

Borrowed -er verbs span a wide register range:

• Fully naturalised (register-neutral, work in writing): télécharger, partager, cliquer, organiser, optimiser.
• Common but informal (fine in speech and casual writing, avoided in formal writing): liker, scroller, googler, briefer.
• Slang (informal speech only): kiffer, ghoster, flexer, chiller, swiper.
• Professional jargon (workplace English-French hybrid): briefer, debriefer, brainstormer, networker.

A learner using kiffer in a job application would sound clumsy; using télécharger in a text message is normal. Match the verb to the situation.

Common Mistakes

Mistake 1: Trying to fit a new verb into the 2e or 3e groupe.

Mistake 2: Forgetting orthographic spelling rules in borrowed -er verbs.

Mistake 3: Using anglicisms in formal contexts.

Mistake 4: Inventing 2e-groupe verbs from colours that don't have them.

Mistake 5: Forgetting that loanwords carry the source-language pronunciation.

Key takeaways

The 1er groupe is the only productive verb class in modern French. Anything new — borrowed, slang, derived, technical — joins it. The 2e groupe is mostly closed (with a narrow exception for colour-change verbs). The 3e groupe is fully closed.

This asymmetry gives you a reliable predictive tool: when you meet or coin a new French verb, conjugate it as -er and you will be right almost every time. It also tells you something deeper about the language — the system has, over centuries, concentrated all its growth in one class, leaving the others as historical reservoirs of high-frequency vocabulary that no longer expands.