Comprendre l’expression française « au pif »
A2 French listening practice · French · Curated for beginners
What does “au pif” mean in French?
Ask a French speaker how far something is and they’ll happily answer “au pif” — at a guess, off the top of their head. “Pif” is slang for the nose, so the phrase literally means “by the nose”: you’re going on instinct, not a tape measure. Use it for anything you estimate roughly — a distance, a price, or how much flour to throw in when you’ve lost the scale.
The nose runs deep in French intuition: “avoir du pif” means to have a good hunch, a nose for things. “Au pif” covers two shades — pure random (“choisis trois cartes au pif,” pick three cards blind) and rough approximation (“à dix mètres au pif”). A close cousin is “au doigt mouillé” (by the wet finger), as if testing the wind.