What Is the 5 to 7 Rule in French?
Le cinq à sept means five to seven. It refers to those loose hours between leaving work and getting home, when nobody is expecting you anywhere.
What people assume you are doing in them depends entirely on which side of the Atlantic you are standing on.
| Where | What it means |
|---|---|
| France | A discreet meeting with a lover |
| Quebec | After work drinks, happy hour |
Same two hours. Very different evening.
It is not a rule of grammar either, despite the way the question usually gets typed into Google. It is an expression, and it is one of the clearest examples of how far French has drifted between the two continents.
What does cinq à sept mean in France?
An affair. Larousse lists it as an invariable masculine noun in exactly that sense.
The reasoning behind it is practical and a bit bleak. Those hours are unaccounted for. You have left the office and you are not yet expected at home, so nobody is looking for you. That made them the traditional slot.
The phrase has been around a long while. Time magazine was writing about the French cinq à sept as an established institution in 1966, and Françoise Sagan put it in her fiction the year after.
It is not vulgar and it is not really slang. It is knowing. When a French speaker says it about someone, they are raising an eyebrow, not checking a diary.
What does cinq à sept mean in Quebec?
Drinks. Entirely respectable, extremely common.
In Quebec a 5 à 7 is colleagues going for a pint, a networking evening, a gallery opening with wine and small things on trays. Wiktionnaire records both senses side by side, with the Quebec meaning covering formal events like a vernissage as well as a casual pint with friends.
You will see it written 5 à 7 or 5@7 on posters and invitations. Bars advertise it. If the gathering starts later, the name just shifts, and a six à huit is the same thing two hours on.
How do I use it without embarrassing myself?
Match the country you are in. That is really the whole rule.
In Montreal, asking a colleague to a 5 à 7 is friendly and unremarkable. Not asking them might be the bigger social error.
In Paris, saying the same sentence to the same colleague will land very differently, and you will know within about two seconds.
If you are unsure, these work everywhere:
| Phrase | Meaning |
|---|---|
| prendre un verre après le travail | to have a drink after work |
| l'apéro | early evening drinks, the everyday term |
| un pot | informal drinks, often marking an occasion at work |
None of them carries a second meaning. L'apéro in particular is warm, universal and impossible to get wrong.
Why does French mean different things in Quebec?
The two varieties separated a few centuries ago and have been drifting ever since. Sometimes Quebec kept an older meaning that France dropped. Sometimes each side invented something new for the same word. And Quebec sits in an English speaking continent, which pulls it in directions France was never pulled.
A few worth knowing before they catch you out:
| Word | In France | In Quebec |
|---|---|---|
| gosses | kids | testicles |
| blonde | a hair colour | your girlfriend |
| chum | not used | your boyfriend, or a male friend |
| dîner | dinner | lunch |
| souper | rare, rural | dinner |
| char | a tank, a chariot | your car |
| magasiner | not used | to go shopping |
Gosses is the one that causes real trouble. Telling a room in Montreal about your lovely gosses will not go the way you hoped.
None of these are mistakes. They are two healthy versions of one language, and knowing which one you are speaking is part of speaking it well. You can study either variety in LanguaCards, with every word spoken aloud so you hear how it actually sounds rather than guessing from the spelling.
Does anyone still use it in the French sense?
Less than they used to, which is interesting in itself.
Older French speakers all recognise it. Whether the practice was ever as widespread as its reputation suggests is another question, and not one anybody is well placed to answer honestly.
Younger speakers know the phrase but rarely reach for it, and some of the youngest do not know it at all. It reads as belonging to a previous generation, the way certain English euphemisms do.
The Quebec sense, meanwhile, is alive and well and on a poster somewhere in Montreal right now.
The wider point
A dictionary will tell you cinq à sept means five to seven. It will not tell you that using it in the wrong city makes a colleague uncomfortable. That part lives in the context around the word, not in the word.
Which is the argument for learning vocabulary with something attached to it. A translation on its own will happily hand you a phrase that is perfectly correct and completely wrong for the room.
LanguaCards covers over 6,000 French words from A1 to C2 in topic packs, with audio, images and grammar explanations on every card. Reviews bring each word back just before you would have forgotten it, so what you learn stays put.
Free packs are included at no cost, there are no ads on any plan, and the first 24 hours after downloading are fully unlocked. Download LanguaCards and start with the words you will actually use.