Learn How to Conjugate "Placer" (to Place) in French

The French verb placer means "to put" or "to place." You can imagine how useful this word will be in your French conversations, so a lesson in conjugating the verb will certainly help. By the end, you'll be able to use placer to say things such as "she placed" and "we are placing."

The Basic Conjugations of Placer

French verb conjugations are not always easy because there are many words to memorize and not all verbs follow the regular rules. Unfortunately, placer is a spelling change verb, so it does come with a catch, but it's easy to remember if you understand it.

For a verb like placer, in which the verb stem ends with a c, there are times when it requires a ç. You'll find this most often in the imperfect past tense, though it can appear anywhere that an a or o come first on the infinitive ending. This change is necessary to retain the soft c sound. Without it, the vowels would make it sound like "cat."

Beyond that minor issue, you will find that placer uses the exact same endings as a regular -er verb, which is the most common conjugation pattern found in French. If you already know a few of those words, you can apply the same endings to this verb.

Using the chart, you can study the most common indicative mood forms of placer. These include the present, future, and imperfect past tenses, which you will use most often. All you need to do is match the subject pronoun to the appropriate tense for your sentence. For example, "I am placing" is je place and "we will place" is nous placerons.

The Present Participle of Placer

The spelling change is also required for placer's present participle. That's because it uses the -ant ending found in many regular verbs. The result is the word plaçant.

Placer in the Compound Past Tense

Beyond the imperfect, you can also use the passé composé to indicate the past tense. To form it, you will need two elements: the present tense conjugate of avoir and the past participle placé. When you put the two together, you get results such as j'ai placé (I placed) and nous avons placé (we placed).

More Simple Conjugations of Placer

Placer has many conjugations, though we'll finish this lesson with a few more of its simplest forms. Each has its own use and can be useful additions to your French vocabulary.

The subjunctive can help you imply uncertainty to the act of placing. The conditional is useful for times when the action is dependent on something else. You will most likely only find the passé simple and imperfect subjunctive in written French as these are literary tenses.

The French imperative is used for direct commands and statements and this is the one time when it's acceptable to skip the subject pronoun. Instead of tu place, you can say place.