Expérience

Expérience is a French noun that covers several related ideas centered on encounter, knowledge, and testing. It can denote personal experience of events or life events, the knowledge or skills arising from those events, or the formal procedure of testing a hypothesis in science.

Etymology: from Latin experientia, from experiri meaning to try or test; cognate with English experience and experiment. In French, the term encompasses both the sense of lived knowledge and the act of conducting tests.

In everyday language, expérience denotes personal or subjective knowledge: avoir de l'expérience means to have experience; faire l'expérience de quelque chose means to undergo something; l'expérience de la vie refers to life experience. In science, une expérience is a controlled test to observe effects and draw conclusions; réaliser une expérience means to perform such a test, and une expérience scientifique is the basic unit of empirical investigation.

In philosophy and the arts, the term can refer to the conscious awareness arising from perception, often distinguished as expérience vécue (lived experience) and contrasted with theoretical knowledge. The expression expérience sensorielle denotes sensory experience, while expérience pratique refers to hands-on experience.

The word also appears in phrases that distinguish practical and professional domains, such as expérience personnelle versus expérience professionnelle. In French, expérimentation is the act of conducting experiments, while expérience typically refers to the result, the experience itself, or the broader sense of knowledge gained through encounters.