French Idioms and Proverbs

Lets call a cat a cat

After the rain, the nice weather

To arrive like March in Lent

To arrive like a dog during a game of skittles

In the case where

At the conk or schnoz (nose)

To have other cats to whip

To have pipelines

To have wheat

To have some dog

Be brave

To have bread on the (bread)board

Hen flesh

Be famished

Have Pull

Get the best of

To have a bag (full)

Be stingy

Be Scared to Death

To have a mouth of wood

To have a well-hung tongue

Have problems

To have someone in your skin

Literally, "to have a cat in the throat"

Literally: To have a spider on the ceiling.

To have a tooth against someone

To have a little hollow (in the stomach)

To have a hair in the hand

Low end

Well in one's skin

To a good cat, good rat

A stitched mouth

The end of the year

To break sugar on the back of someone

To break his feet

To break grain

To break the pipe

To shuffle off this mortal coil

A hundred times announced

In the pocket

Sing like a saucepan; "un casserole" may by itself refer to a lousy singer

To look for noon at 2 pm

Thing promised, thing owing

To slam the door in his face

To slam the door

Like your backside and your shirt

To know the music

Fil: wire

As in "gunshot"

Cutting hairs in quarters

To discover the pot of roses

To tell him his four truths

To give one's tongue to the cat

In suffering

To send on the roses

Easy as hello

To build castles in Spain

To make fat

To make a bridge (between a holiday and week-end); also used in wrestling and yoga

To make a little mouth

To make a pretty leg

To have All Saints Day weather

Ironically meaning 'make a mistake'

As high as three apples

Happy at the game, unhappy at love

The nut must be cracked to get the almond

Literally: One must spare both the goat and the cabbage.

Literally: He has long teeth.

He doesn't break three feet on a duck

It's raining ropes

There's a lot of people on the balcony

There is a bell sounding

Literally: I have bad hair (because it hurts).

I have a bowel full of it

To play like feet

Right to one's fingertips

A Cajun expression, don't drop the potato

The tree often hides the forest

Will dance

Dogs don't make cats

The habit doesn't make the monk

Free as the air

The question isn't asked

To put water in one's wine

To mess up, speak with excessive candor, or to discuss something inapropriate

To put one's tongue in one's pocket

My eye!

My little finger told me

To mount on a pin

Old boy

To not lack air

To not come back from it

Not even have a radish

Don't wake a cat who is sleeping

Don't shoot the pianist

Stay busy with your own onions

Operation snail

Literally: Yes, when chickens have teeth.

To appear before God

Like a Spanish cow

To pass from the rooster to the donkey

Pass a white night

To pedal in the sauerkraut

A term of endearment - literally "little cabbage"

Fish of April

To wear the hat

To take your legs to your neck

When you talk about the wolf (you see its tail)

What fly bit you?

He who breaks the glasses has to pay for them

Who lives will see

Let's return to our sheep

Nothing to see

To roll under the table

Rolling in gold

Without forgetting

Save who can

To save the stake/ante

To de-fog

To pour oneself a smooth one

To roll your thumbs

To feel as one being aimed at

To blow out one's candles

To be sucking dandelion roots

On the field

On the fact

To hold back the blow

To pull a carrot

To fall into the apples

From the comic strip Astérix

To fall (be stuck) in the harbor

To fall correctly

To fall on your head

To fall [them] all

To turn the tongue seven times within the mouth before speaking

At the end of every field

To be way off the mark; to be in left field; to not know shit

To be in some nice sheets

To be in the jam

On the right page

Soaked like a soup

To be focused on the thing

On the sidewalk

To be a badly licked bear

In English it is the declarative, "you realize"

A useless mouth

At the end of the earth

One of these four mornings

A pillow failure

A boy missing

To sell the bear's skin (before killing it)