léser

Inherited from Middle French leser, ultimately derived from Latin laesus, past participle of laedo (“to hurt, offend”).

• IPA^(key): /le.ze/

• Audio:

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léser

1. (transitive) to wrong; to do wrong by (someone); to harm, to hurt
   • 1913, Marcel Proust, translated by Brian Nelson, Un amour de Swann [Swann in Love], page 122:

     Elle savait que son mensonge lésait d’ordinaire gravement l’homme à qui elle le faisait, et à la merci duquel elle allait peut-être tomber si elle mentait mal.

     She knew, moreover, that through her lie she was usually seriously hurting the man to whom she was telling it, and at whose mercy she would perhaps find herself if she lied badly.

   • 2021 May 2, “La Corée du Nord rejette tout dialogue avec Washington [North Korea rejects all dialogue with Washington]”, in Le Monde‎:

     Nous avons suffisamment averti les Etats-Unis pour comprendre qu’ils seront lésés s’ils nous provoquent.

     We have sufficiently warned the United States for them to understand that they will be harmed if they provoke us.

2. (transitive, medicine) to lesion (to produce a lesion in)

This verb is conjugated like céder. It is a regular -er verb, except that its last stem vowel alternates between /e/ (written 'é') and /ɛ/ (written 'è'), with the latter being used before mute 'e'. One special case is the future stem, used in the future and the conditional. Before 1990, the future stem of such verbs was written léser-, reflecting the historic pronunciation /e/. In 1990, the French Academy recommended that it be written lèser-, reflecting the now common pronunciation /ɛ/, thereby making this distinction consistent throughout the conjugation (and also matching in this regard the conjugations of verbs like lever and jeter). Both spellings are in use today, and both are therefore given here.

• “léser”, in Trésor de la langue française informatisé , 2012.