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A1 French listening practice · French · Curated for beginners

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What does “sablier” mean in French?

un sablier
French word-building
an hourglass — literally “the thing that holds the sand”

Le sable is sand. Add -ier and you get un sablier: the object that holds it, an hourglass. That ending is one of French’s most productive, and one of its most useful jobs is turning the name of a content into the name of its container. Once you notice it, un sucrier, un saladier and un cendrier decode themselves — sugar bowl, salad bowl, ashtray.

The same suffix names the plant that yields a fruit: pommepommier, cerisecerisier, poirepoirier. Container or tree, the logic is identical — -ier marks the thing that the first word comes out of, or goes into.

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