Word.ws English Dictionary

envie

/ɪnˈvaɪ/

envie verb: to vie; to emulate; to strive.

Verb

envie (third-person singular simple present envies, present participle envying, simple past and past participle envied)

  1. (obsolete) To vie; to emulate; to strive.
    • In which all pleasures plenteously abownd,
      And none does others happinesse envye1590, Edmund Spenser, “Book II”, in The Faerie Queene. […], London: […] [John Wolfe] for William Ponsonbie, →OCLC

Noun

IPA/ɑːnˈviː/

envie (plural envies)

  1. (Louisiana, US) A strong desire or craving, especially for (a particular kind of) food.
    • "Oooo, yum." Linda licked her lips. "I had an envie for that." An envie is an urge. She walked to the oven, opened it, and looked in.2009, Shane Hebert, The Ballad of Corey Robichaux, self-published, page 27
    • "I had an envie for something sweet so picked up King cakes for dessert. Bit of a lagniappe too, she gave us a dozen not ten."2018, Mark Vaughan, The Beacon 2: Battle of Nuclear Creek, self-published, unnumbered page

Forms of envie

Verb
third-person singular presentenvies
present participleenvying
past participleenvied
pastenvied
Noun
pluralenvies

Origin of envie

From en- + vie.

Borrowed from French envie (“urge, craving”). Doublet of envy.

Words that rhyme with envie

48 more rhymesFewer rhymes

Questions about envie

What does envie mean?
Envie means to vie; to emulate; to strive.
What part of speech is envie?
Envie can be a verb or a noun.
How do you pronounce envie?
Envie is pronounced /ɪnˈvaɪ/.
What is the past tense of envie?
The past tense of envie is envied.

Words near envie in the dictionary

  1. envermeils
  2. enviability
  3. enviable
  4. enviableness
  5. enviably
  6. envie
  7. envied
  8. envier
  9. enviers
  10. envies
  11. enviest

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: envie (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “envie.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/envie. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.