Des éboueurs retrouvent un ticket de loterie gagnant
B1 French listening practice · French · Curated for intermediate learners
What does “faire une boulette” mean in French?
Une boulette is a little ball of something: a meatball, a ball of bread, a wad of paper. In informal French it is also a blunder. Faire une boulette is to mess up in a small, avoidable, faintly embarrassing way — the sort of mistake you wince at rather than one that ruins a life. And se rendre compte de la boulette is the moment you realise what you have just done.
The mistake sense has been around since the early nineteenth century; the usual story involves the paper pellets of an inattentive schoolboy, though that is a story rather than a documented origin. The register is casual — fine among friends and on television, not in a formal report. Near neighbours: une gaffe, une bourde, un impair. In this news item a woman bins a lottery ticket marked “non payable”, assuming she has lost — then realises it was worth a million euros.
Vocabulary frequency
How common is the vocabulary in this B1 French listening practice listening practice?
General French frequency
Spoken French frequency
Words above this video’s level
Quick glosses for vocabulary that goes beyond this video’s B1 level.
Source: wordfreq 3.1.1 (general) · Lexique 3.83 (spoken). Buckets approximate; exact ranks not stored.