Boire, meaning to drink in French, is one of the most useful verbs in the language. Whether we’re talking about drinking water or wine, or whether it’s a person or an animal who drinks, you’ll surely want to know your boire conjugation.

Boire is an irregular verb, so many of its tenses have conjugations that need to be learned outright. In today’s post we’ll go over every boire conjugation so you have an easy reference for all of this important verb’s tenses. We’ll break our post down by mood, first showing our boire conjugations in the simple tenses and then covering the compound tenses.

The French verb Boire: Introduction

Boire is a third-group verb, since many of its conjugations don’t follow the pattern of regular -er or -ir verbs. It’s also distinct from other common ‑oir verbs such as voir, savoir, devoir, or pouvoir. The conjugation of boire even has some differences from that of the other common ‑oire verb, croire.

There’s nonetheless one derivative of the French verb boire, which is reboire. As you might guess, reboire means to drink again, or perhaps simply to redrink. Every boire conjugation we see here can be applied exactly the same way to get the reboire conjugation.

Whether you’re heading to happy hour with friends, ordering drinks at a restaurant, or giving some water to your pets, knowing all the ways to conjugate the verb to drink in French will come in handy in so many situations!

We’ll keep our explanations of each tense to a minimum, simply providing links to our dedicated grammar posts where applicable. If you’re a total beginner, start with our in-depth lesson on French verb conjugation and verb tenses. Now let’s get started with our boire conjugation charts!

Boire: Impersonal forms

Before we get into our conjugations, let’s cover the impersonal forms of boire. The base form, boire, is the infinitif, while the participe, bu, appears in all of the compound tenses later on. In the compound tenses, boire takes the auxiliary verb avoir, as does its derivative reboire.

Boire conjugation: Indicative mood

We’ll start with the four simple tenses in l’indicatif: le présent, l’imparfait, le passé simple, and le futur simple. Then we’ll see the four compound tenses: le passé composé, le plus-que-parfait, le passé antérieur, and le futur antérieur.

Boire conjugation: présent de l’indicatif

Note the irregular stem buv‑ in the first‑ and second-person plural forms of our boire present tense conjugations.

Boire conjugation: imparfait

Note that we use the stem buv‑ in all of our boire imparfait conjugations.

Boire conjugation: passé simple

Boire conjugation: futur simple

Note that the je conjugation is different from the tu form when we conjugate boire in the futur simple, unlike the other simple indicative tenses of boire.

The stem also differs from the other simple tenses in that it remains boir‑ rather than buv‑, so our boire futur simple conjugations actually follow the regular pattern.

Boire conjugation: passé composé

Boire conjugation: plus-que-parfait

Boire conjugation: passé antérieur

Boire conjugation: futur antérieur

Boire conjugation: Conditional mood

Now let’s take a look at the boire conjugation charts for le conditionnel. The boire conditionnel conjugations follow the regular patterns in both the simple and compound tenses.

The conditionnel présent endings are the same as the imparfait endings we saw above. We can easily differentiate these two tenses of boire since the imparfait takes the irregular stem buv‑ while the conditionnel takes the regular stem boir‑.

Give your pronunciation some practice with the distinctive ‑i‑ sound in the nous and vous forms of boire conditionnel présent: boirions and boiriez!

Boire conjugation: conditionnel présent

Boire conjugation: conditionnel passé

Boire conjugation: Subjunctive mood

Now we’re ready to cover the boire subjonctif conjugations. We’ll start with the two subjunctive tenses that are actually used, le subjonctif présent and le subjonctif passé. Then we’ll cover the two archaic subjunctive tenses, l’imparfait du subjonctif and le plus-que-parfait du subjonctif.

Boire conjugation: subjonctif présent

The irregular subjunctive stem of boire is boiv‑ for most of the grammatical persons, while it has the same stem for nous and vous that we saw in the présent and imparfait of the indicative: buv‑.

Note that the spelling here is identical between the first‑ and third-person singular conjugations, in contrast to the indicative tenses where the spelling was the same between the je and tu conjugations.

Boire conjugation: subjonctif passé

Boire conjugation: subjonctif imparfait

Boire conjugation: subjonctif plus-que-parfait

Boire conjugation: Imperative mood

We’re nearly done with all of our boire conjugations, with just the command form remaining in case you need to tell someone to drink in French. With boire imperatif, we use the exact same conjugations as boire présent de l’indicatif.

We present both impératif tenses in the same boire conjugation chart here.

Conclusion: Boire conjugation in French

We’ve just seen the full conjugation charts for the French verb boire, in every mood and tense. As an irregular verbe du troisième groupe, many of the verb forms need to be learned outright.

We saw how many of the tenses demonstrate fairly regular boire conjugations, whereas several are indeed built on different irregular stems. In addition to the regular stem of boir‑, we also saw buv‑ across several tenses grammatical persons, while the boire subjunctive conjugation was built around boive for several grammatical persons.

This concludes our post on French boire conjugation, so now you have a full reference on all the forms of to drink in French!