Le Présent: Lire et Écrire

Lire ("to read") and écrire ("to write") are the literacy pair — the two verbs that, together, define what it means to be functionally literate in French. They are also irregular -re verbs whose conjugations rhyme with each other in pleasing ways: both insert an -s- or -v- in the plural that is absent in the singular, both have unpredictable past participles (lu, écrit), and both anchor a small but productive family of prefixed verbs (relire, élire on one side; décrire, prescrire, transcrire, s'inscrire on the other).

This page lays out both paradigms with phonetic detail, walks through the major uses (reading materials, writing media, addressing letters with à), maps the families of derived verbs, and addresses head-on the construction écrire à quelqu'un — a place where English's transitive write someone needs to be retrained to the French indirect-object pattern.

The paradigm of lire

The pattern: a li- stem in the singular, a lis- stem in the plural and 3pl. The /z/ sound that marks the plural forms (and audibly distinguishes il lit from ils lisent) comes from the s before the vowel-initial endings -ons, -ez, -ent. The 3pl lisent has a silent -ent but a pronounced /z/ — /il liz/.

Past participle: lu (highly irregular, no relation to the present stem). J'ai lu ce livre — "I read this book."

The paradigm of écrire

The pattern is the same shape as lire but with a different consonant: an écri- stem in the singular, an écriv- stem in the plural and 3pl. Note three things:

• The mandatory elision j'écris. Because écrire begins with a vowel, je must contract to j' — never /je écris. Same applies to negation: je n'écris pas (not /je ne écris pas).
• Liaison with vowel-initial subject pronouns. Il écrit has a liaison /l/ that's already audible from the l of il, but the plural triggers the /z/ liaison: ils écrivent /il‿zekʁiv/, nous écrivons /nu‿zekʁivɔ̃/.
• Audible singular/plural distinction. Like lire, the consonant of the plural stem (here -v-) is pronounced and clearly audible: /ekʁi/ (sg) vs /ekʁiv/ (pl). The v survives where many other consonants would be silent.

Past participle: écrit /ekʁi/ (irregular but predictable from the -cri- stem). J'ai écrit une lettre — "I wrote a letter."

Side-by-side comparison

The two verbs are most easily learned as a pair. Here's the parallel structure:

The shared logic: a short singular stem (li-, écri-), a longer plural stem with an added consonant (lis-, écriv-), and an irregular past participle that breaks both patterns. Almost every irregular -re verb in French follows some version of this template — see Regular -re verbs and The Three Groups for the broader context.

Use 1: Reading material

Lire is transitive — it takes a direct object specifying what is being read. The full range of objects:

A useful idiom: lire entre les lignes (to read between the lines), lire dans les pensées de quelqu'un (to read someone's mind), lire à haute voix (to read aloud).

Use 2: Writing — direct object and indirect-object pattern

Écrire is more complex than lire because it takes both a direct object (what is written) and an indirect object with à (the recipient).

This is one of the most consistent transfer errors English speakers make. English allows write someone (with no preposition: I write my friend every week). French requires the preposition à: j'écris à mon ami toutes les semaines. Without à, the construction is ungrammatical.

When the recipient is replaced by an indirect-object pronoun, the pronoun goes before the verb:

Use 3: How something is written / spelled

Écrire also covers spelling and orthographic representation:

The reflexive construction s'écrire is the standard way to ask or explain how a word is spelled — far more common than épeler (which technically means "to spell out letter by letter" and sounds bookish in casual conversation).

The écrire family

A productive family of verbs is built on écrire with various prefixes. They all conjugate exactly like écrire — same stems, same endings, same past participle pattern (-it).

The reflexive s'inscrire ("to register / to sign up") is by far the most useful of these in everyday life — it covers everything from registering for a class to creating an online account.

The lire family

Lire has a much smaller family — only two derived verbs in regular use:

Élire is a high-frequency verb in political and institutional contexts (élire un président, un député, un délégué). It conjugates exactly like lire: j'élis, tu élis, il élit, nous élisons, vous élisez, ils élisent; past participle élu.

Common idiomatic patterns

A handful of fixed expressions deserve attention:

A subtlety: writing in / on something

For the medium of writing — paper, a notebook, a wall — French uses sur (on a surface) or dans (inside a container):

But for a language ("write in French," "write in Spanish"), use en:

For materials ("write with a pencil"), use avec or au (when the article is in fixed expressions):

Common Mistakes

Mistake 1: Forgetting à in écrire à.

This is the single most consistent English-speaker error with écrire.

Mistake 2: Conjugating singular into plural form.

Mistake 3: Missing the consonant in plural.

(Nous lions exists as a form of the verb lier "to bind / tie" — a different verb entirely.)

Mistake 4: Missing elision with écrire.

Mistake 5: Using épeler where s'écrire is more natural.

Épeler is technically "to spell out letter by letter" and is reserved for context like a phone call where you're literally dictating letters one at a time.

Mistake 6: Wrong past participle.

(Lit is the 3sg present, not the participle. Lu is the irregular past participle.)

Key takeaways

Lire and écrire are best learned as a pair. They share a common structural pattern (short singular stem, longer plural stem with added consonant), they cover the two halves of literacy, and their compound families overlap in domain (academic, institutional, communicative).

Three points to internalize:

1. The stem alternation is audible. Unlike many French verbs where singular and plural sound identical, lire and écrire keep their plural consonant pronounced — il lit /li/ vs ils lisent /liz/, il écrit /ekʁi/ vs ils écrivent /ekʁiv/. This is one of the rare places where French listeners can hear person/number directly.
2. Écrire takes à before the recipient. English's write someone must become French's écrire à quelqu'un. Drop the à and the sentence is ungrammatical.
3. The compound family is productive. S'inscrire, décrire, prescrire, élire, relire — all useful, all built on the same pattern, all with predictable stems and irregular -it/-u past participles. Once you know écrire and lire, you have free access to a dozen more verbs.

For the past participle behavior, see Passé Composé Formation: Irregular Verbs.