DELF B1 Vocabulary List (Intermediate French)

DELF B1 is the threshold diploma: dealing with most situations encountered while travelling, describing experiences, and giving brief reasons and explanations. It is where the subjunctive arrives, il faut que tu viennes, and where the vocabulary broadens into work, health, opinion and abstract feeling.

For candidates preparing DELF B1. Maps to CEFR B1.

About DELF B1

DELF B1 is the threshold diploma: dealing with most situations encountered while travelling, describing experiences, and giving brief reasons and explanations. It is where the subjunctive arrives, il faut que tu viennes, and where the vocabulary broadens into work, health, opinion and abstract feeling. Every DELF is scored across four skills, and B1 is the level at which candidates first meet the full argumentative task rather than a descriptive one.

Who this list is for

DELF B1 appears in French naturalisation procedures and is a common baseline for work where French is used but not written formally. It suits learners who can hold a real conversation and follow slow news but still run out of vocabulary mid-argument. People who moved to France and picked the language up informally usually test around here even when they feel more fluent than that.

How to study

B1 rewards input over instruction. Pick one French podcast and listen daily, because the subjunctive is absorbed through exposure and drilled rules do not survive exam pressure. Use spaced repetition for connectors and argument markers, pourtant, en revanche, d'ailleurs, which is what the B1 writing task is actually scored on. Write weekly and have it corrected; errors that break meaning cost far more than errors that do not.

The list (1713 words)

Some example sentences come from the Tatoeba Project (tatoeba.org), CC BY 2.0 FR. The rest were written for MindDory. Tatoeba, CC BY 2.0 FR.

Where do the words after this list come from?

A list has an end. The words you keep for good usually turn up somewhere else — in a page you read, a show you watched, or a conversation you had — one at a time, and rarely at the level you planned for.

MindDory connects to Claude, Cursor, and other assistants that speak the Model Context Protocol, so a word you meet while you are chatting is saved to your deck as a flashcard without you leaving the conversation. There is no copy and paste, no CSV export, and no browser extension.

How the assistant connection works

Choosing an app