What is the difference between au secours and aidez-moi?

Au secours is a cry, addressed to anyone who can hear. Aidez-moi asks one person, politely, to help you.

French · phrasebook

How to say help in French

Help in French, shouted in an emergency, is au secours or à l'aide. To ask a particular person for help, French uses the verb: aide-moi to someone you call tu, aidez-moi to someone you call vous.

Aurélien CuvelierSep 19, 2026

au secours

help

anyone

The ways to say it

au secours

help

anyone

à l'aide

same meaning

anyone

aide-moi

help me

one person you call tu

aidez-moi

help me

someone you call vous, or several people

How to use it

The first two exchanges below are cries for help: someone locked behind a door, a woman who has fallen on the stairs. Neither is addressed to anyone in particular. In the third, a parent who has lost a child shouts au secours and then turns to a passer-by with aidez-moi and please.

Aide-moi and aidez-moi are imperatives with the word for me attached by a hyphen. They follow the tu and vous split like every request.

Watch out

The last letter of au secours is silent, greyed in the examples.

In a real conversation

Each exchange is a line and its reply. 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.

Au secours ! Je ne peux pas ouvrir la porte !Help! I can't open the door!J'arrive ! Attends, je prends la clé.I'm coming! Wait, I'm getting the key.

À l'aide ! Cette dame est tombée dans l'escalier !Help! This lady has fallen on the stairs!Restez avec elle, monsieur, j'appelle un médecin.Stay with her, sir, I'm calling a doctor.

Au secours ! Aidez-moi, s'il vous plaît, j'ai perdu mon enfant !Help! Help me, please, I've lost my child!Bien sûr, madame. Je vais appeler la police tout de suite.Of course, madam. I'm going to call the police right away.

Questions people ask

What is the difference between au secours and aidez-moi?: Au secours is a cry, addressed to anyone who can hear. Aidez-moi asks one person, politely, to help you.
How do you say help me in French?: Aide-moi to someone you call tu, aidez-moi to someone you call vous.

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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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