Passé composé: avoir + irregular past participles

There is no shortcut here. The most frequent verbs in French — avoir, être, faire, dire, voir, prendre, mettre, vivre, boire, savoir, pouvoir, vouloir, devoir — all have irregular past participles that you simply have to memorize. The good news is that the list is finite, the high-frequency members can be counted on two hands, and the patterns within the list are loose but real, so it isn't pure brute-force memorization.

This page lists the irregular participles you'll meet first, groups them into rough sub-patterns, and gives natural example sentences for each. All of these verbs take avoir as their auxiliary unless flagged otherwise (a few — venir, devenir, revenir — are on the maison d'être list and use être; that's covered on a separate page). For the general logic of the passé composé, see the overview.

The core list

These twenty-eight verbs cover roughly 90% of irregular-participle sightings in everyday French. Memorize them in the order shown — frequency-weighted from top to bottom.

Sub-patterns inside the irregular list

The list looks chaotic at first, but four loose families account for most of it.

The -u family

The largest family. Verbs in -oir (avoir, voir, savoir, pouvoir, vouloir, devoir, recevoir), some in -oire (boire, croire), some in -ir (tenir, venir, courir), and some in -re (lire, vivre, plaire, taire, connaître, paraître).

The -it family

Verbs in -ire (dire → dit, écrire → écrit, conduire → conduit, frire → frit, traduire → traduit) and a few related forms.

The -is family

A small but high-frequency group: prendre → pris, mettre → mis, asseoir → assis (and the compound forms: apprendre → appris, comprendre → compris, surprendre → surpris, promettre → promis, permettre → permis).

The -int and -ert family

A handful but worth knowing. Verbs in -eindre/-aindre/-oindre give -eint/-aint/-oint (peindre → peint, craindre → craint, joindre → joint, atteindre → atteint, éteindre → éteint). And the small -rir/-vrir family of ouvrir, offrir, couvrir, souffrir gives -ert.

Spelling watch points

A few participles have orthographic surprises worth pointing out explicitly.

dû with the circumflex

The past participle of devoir takes a circumflex on the u in the masculine singular only: dû. The accent disappears in the feminine and plural forms (due, dus, dues). The reason is historical: the circumflex distinguishes the participle from the partitive article du ("some"), which would otherwise be a homograph. J'ai dû partir ("I had to leave") versus du pain ("some bread") are not the same word.

reçu with the cedilla

The participle of recevoir keeps the cedilla on the c to preserve the /s/ sound before u: reçu. Without the cedilla, recu would be pronounced /ʁə.ky/ — wrong.

The same cedilla logic applies to compounds: aperçu (from apercevoir), déçu (from décevoir), conçu (from concevoir).

plu — two different verbs, same form

The past participle plu is the participle of both plaire ("to please") and pleuvoir ("to rain"). In context the meaning is unambiguous, but the surface form is identical.

été — invariable

The past participle of être is été. It is invariable: it never agrees with anything, even when the subject is feminine or plural and the auxiliary is avoir. Elles ont été contentes — été stays bare. (The agreement is on the predicate adjective contentes, not on the participle.)

High-frequency examples in context

A page of memorized participles is harder to retain than the same participles seen in real sentences. Drill these.

Avoir and être: their own past participles

The two auxiliaries have past participles you'll use constantly, including with each other:

In compound tenses, avoir + eu and avoir + été both occur. They look strange the first time you produce them, but they are perfectly normal: j'ai eu simply means "I had / I have had," and j'ai été means "I was / I have been."

Quick comparison with English

English has its own irregular past-participle system (written, taken, said, made, done, gone), so French learners are at least already used to the idea that past participles aren't always predictable. The conceptual jump is small. The main practical wrinkle is that English uses do/did for emphasis and questions ("Did you see it?" — auxiliary do + bare infinitive), while French uses the regular passé composé in those cases (Tu l'as vu ?). Don't try to mirror the English structure word-for-word.

The other thing to watch is that some English verbs like to know split into two French verbs: savoir (to know a fact) and connaître (to know a person or place). Their past participles — su and connu — both translate to "knew/known," so context decides which one you need.

Common Mistakes

Key takeaways

• Roughly twenty-eight irregular past participles cover most of what you'll meet. Memorize them.
• Two-thirds of irregular participles end in -u — that's the safest default guess for any irregular verb.
• The other patterns are -it (dit, écrit, conduit), -is (pris, mis, compris, promis), -eint/-aint/-oint (peint, craint, joint), and -ert (ouvert, offert, couvert).
• Watch the spelling: dû with circumflex, reçu with cedilla, plu for both plaire and pleuvoir, été invariable.
• All of these verbs except venir, devenir, revenir take avoir as their auxiliary.