As we saw in a recent post, beauty is not a linguistic concept. Linguistics is about the scientific study of language, and science doesn’t have a concept of beauty, at least not for its objects of study (as opposed to, say, a really nice proof). So, if I say that Brazilian Portuguese has the most beautiful consonnes fricatives (fricative consonants), I’m speaking as a civilian (or “normal person,” as we linguists call the rest of you), not in my official capacity.
Having gotten that disclaimer out of the way, you’ll find below a list of people’s thoughts about the most beautiful French verbs. There aren’t a lot of repeats on this list (unlike a similar list of nouns that I saw the other day), so I’ll just pass it on without much comment, and add some of my favorite French verbs or verbal expressions to use:
- rester cloîtré dans mon appartement: to stay shut up in my apartment–literally, to stay cloistered.
- haussmanniser: to Haussmannize.
- podcaster: to download a podcast, to listen to by podcast. (In other words: the opposite of the English meaning, although if you look it up on Linguee.fr,you’ll see some translations with the English meaning, too. I’ve only heard it with the opposite of the English meaning, though.)
- retweeter: to retweet.
- chunker: to break down into analyzable units. This is a technical term in language processing, where the usual English verb is “to chunk.”
Here’s the list, from Quora:
https://www.quora.com/What-are-some-of-the-most-beautiful-French-verbs-youve-ever-come-across
Zipf's Law 
I am intrigued by the French meaning of ‘podcaster’. How do you say ‘to podcast’ (rather than download) in French?
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I like Haussmanizer, As I read French interiors magazines for ideas, I sometimes see other architectural design or decorative styles turned into a verb. I like this underlining of the language as “live”.
Incidentally, I put forth a new verb to describe the work so far on our French house ….” Hoveller”
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Or maybe” hoveler”. You are the linguist
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If we make it “hoveliser,” then we don’t have to worry about whether the present tense is j’hovelle or j’hovèle, right? 🙂
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Sounds good, I’ll write to M. Hollande.
Just tormenting myself by conjugating it. Shall we make it a regular “er ” verb?
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Are you saying your home is a hovel?
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Yes Mel, right now it is! (read earlier posts when you have a spare year!) But hopefully the ten year French project will have a beautiful outcome
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I am sure it will be magnifique. Will happily follow along for at least the final years! 😉
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Hi, ME,
I’ll give you the best information that I can find on this. Let me start by saying that I hear this verb on “Les Matins de France Culture” most mornings, and they use it in the context of saying that you can go to their web site to “télécharger et podcaster” the show.
I went to the Linguee.fr web site, which is really good for finding examples of words in context. I set the directionality option to French -> English and entered podcaster, and got one option–a noun. Oh–it won’t let me insert a screen shot in the comments, so I’m going to update the post to show you what it looks like. Hang on…
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Maybe it’s as simple as ‘faire un podcast’?
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I accidentally deleted half of this post. When I figure out how to recover it, I’ll add screen shots of the search that I did.
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I think we might have to make “hoveliser” a regular ER verb–there don’t seem to be many options for neologisms…
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If I knew what’s neologism was I could furnish a response….
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Sorry, the “‘s” was superfluous. I swear my new phone is sentient and is editing my comments to make me look grammatically challenged.
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Phones are good for that. Neologism: newly-made word. French verbal neologisms are almost entirely in the ER class: tweeter, retweeter, chunker, etc.
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