What is the feminine of beau?

Belle, and belles in the plural.

Before a masculine singular noun that starts with a vowel sound. Everywhere else the masculine singular is beau.

Does beau go before or after the noun?

Before. It is one of the small group of common French adjectives placed in front of the noun.

French · phrasebook

How to say beautiful in French

Beautiful in French is beau with a masculine noun and belle with a feminine one. The adjective agrees with what it describes, and it has a third singular form, bel, used before a masculine noun that starts with a vowel sound.

Aurélien CuvelierSep 19, 2026

beau

beautiful, good-looking, lovely to look at

masculine

The ways to say it

beau

beautiful, good-looking, lovely to look at

masculine

belle

same meaning

feminine

bel

same meaning

masculine, before a vowel

beaux

same meaning

masculine plural

belles

same meaning

feminine plural

How to use it

Most French adjectives follow the noun. This one goes before it, as in the sentence below about a lovely afternoon, where it also takes its form bel because the noun opens on a vowel. After the verb to be it stays where English puts it, as in the sentences about the garden and the view.

The plural forms are beaux and belles. You choose between the four by looking at the noun: its gender, then its number. The adjective never agrees with the speaker.

Watch out

Bel is not a separate word with a separate meaning. It is beau adapted so that two vowel sounds do not collide, and it exists only in the masculine singular.

In a real sentence

Greyed letters are written and not pronounced. A tie marks a liaison, with the sound you hear under it. A label under a verb names its tense when it is not the present.

beautiful, good-looking, lovely to look at

Le jardin de ma grand-mère est très beau.My grandmother's garden is very beautiful.

beautiful, good-looking, lovely to look at

La vue sur la mer est vraiment belle.The view of the sea is really beautiful.

beautiful, good-looking, lovely to look at

Les tableaux de ce musée sont très beaux.The paintings in this museum are very beautiful.

fine, lovely (of weather or of a time you enjoy)

Nous avons passé un bel après-midi ensemble.We spent a lovely afternoon together.

Questions people ask

What is the feminine of beau?: Belle, and belles in the plural.
When do you use bel?: Before a masculine singular noun that starts with a vowel sound. Everywhere else the masculine singular is beau.
Does beau go before or after the noun?: Before. It is one of the small group of common French adjectives placed in front of the noun.

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Written by

Aurélien Cuvelier Founder, NuanceDeck

Aurélien Cuvelier builds NuanceDeck: the app, and the verification pipeline behind its dictionary. Every entry is grounded in the official TORFL lexical minimum and a 20,000-word frequency corpus, and every example sentence passes a certification review before it ships.

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