Dormir — to sleep | French Verb Chart

🇬🇧 Dormir: the sleep verb that keeps its avoir

Dormir — to sleep — runs the sortir-family pattern: the stem consonant m disappears in the singular (je dors, tu dors, il dort) and returns in the plural (nous dormons, vous dormez, ils dorment). Imparfait je dormais, futur je dormirai, subjonctif que je dorme — and unlike its movement-verb classmates partir and sortir, dormir keeps avoir in the past: « j’ai dormi » — sleeping takes you nowhere, so être stays home. That auxiliary contrast (je suis parti BUT j’ai dormi) is the family’s best exam question and the cleanest illustration of how French assigns être to genuine movement and change.

One disambiguation this conjugation chart owes you: dormir exists in Spanish too, and search results love mixing them up. Spanish dormir is a stem-changer (duermo, duermes… with yo/tú/nosotros/vosotros and a preterite of its own); FRENCH dormir never changes its vowel — je dors, nous dormons, steady through every tense of the table. If your other language is Spanish, enjoy the free vocabulary and ignore the false-friend grammar: the French verb is the simpler roommate. Every form above — present, imperfect, future, conditional, imperative, subjunctive — is the French one.

Sleep French is idiom country: faire la grasse matinée (sleep in — literally the fat morning), une nuit blanche (an all-nighter — a white night), « je n’ai pas fermé l’œil » (didn’t sleep a wink), « dormir comme un bébé » — and the eternal parental « dors bien ! » (sleep well) beside « fais de beaux rêves » (sweet dreams). The reflexive cousin s’endormir (to fall asleep) upgrades to être with agreement — « elle s’est endormie » — completing the bedtime grammar set. Drill with your own nights: j’ai dormi huit heures, je dormais quand tu as appelé (the interruption pattern from our past-tense guide, at home in pyjamas), je dormirai mieux demain.