What Does Apres Mean? The French Word Nobody Can Spell

Apres. Five letters, one accent almost nobody types, and a word that gets spelled wrong more reliably than anything else on a ski holiday. It means exactly one thing — and nothing to do with drinking.

Last updated: 28 September 2026

💡 By the way: for the “after” part we built a metre of wood with four places on it — the SwigSki3000®. More on that further down ↓

What does apres mean?

Apres means “after”. It is an ordinary French preposition, about as exciting as the English “after”. The root is Latin: ad pressum, roughly “close by”, which became French après by way of late Latin.

English speakers tend to assume there must be more to it — something about alcohol, or a party, or a particular kind of bar. There is not. It means: afterwards. Everything else is what people do with the time.

Where the word hides in French

Aftershave, afternoon, the day after tomorrow: the same après sits inside all of them. Once you notice it, you find it in a surprising number of French expressions that have quietly moved into English too:

• après-midi — the afternoon. Literally: after midday — and midi itself comes from “middle of the day”.
• après-demain — the day after tomorrow.
• après vous — “after you”, the polite phrase in a doorway.
• d'après — “according to”. D'après lui means: according to him.
• après coup — after the fact, in hindsight.
• après-rasage — aftershave. Same word, in French.
• après-soleil — the after-sun lotion.
• après-shampooing — conditioner, the rinse after the shampoo.
• après-guerre — the post-war years.

The pattern never changes: après plus the thing it comes after. And the word this article is about is built the same way.

Apres-ski: after the ski, and also a boot

Put a ski behind it and you get the famous one. Literally: after the ski. It covers everything that happens once the skiing stops — sitting down, warming up, eating, drinking, at some point dancing. And on a good day, a round on the Shotski.

What the Alpine countries made of it, which drinks belong to it and when it starts is in our main article: What is apres ski? This piece is about the word.

And the word has a catch hardly anybody knows: in French, the number decides what you are talking about. L'après-ski in the singular is the time after a day on the slopes. Les après-skis in the plural are shoes — the thickly lined boots you change into afterwards. The Dictionnaire de l'Académie française lists nothing else: only the boot.

German does the same. The Duden, standard dictionary of the language that built the hut industry, also puts clothing first: sense one is the “sportlich-saloppe, modische Kleidung”, the casual sporty outfit worn after skiing. The party is only sense two.

So the hut, the music, the volume are what Austria and Germany added. The word, with its plain meaning, was there long before.

Apres, aprés, apre, apreski: why nobody can spell it

The word reached English in the early 1950s — first attested 1951 according to Merriam-Webster, 1954 according to the Oxford English Dictionary — and English never rebuilt it. It just stopped writing the accent. In English, “apres ski” without an accent is not the sloppy version, it is the normal one: in our own search data the accent-free spelling beats the accented one by roughly ten to one in the UK and thirty to one in the US. The hyphen goes the same way — “apres ski” as two loose words is far more common than “apres-ski”.

What happens next is predictable for a word said far more often than it is read: it gets heard, repeated, and written the way it sounds. Linguists call that a mondegreen — a misheard line that hardens into a new one, the way Hendrix gets “'scuse me while I kiss this guy” instead of “kiss the sky”. If the misheard version hardens into a spelling and gets reinterpreted on top, the term is eggcorn.

We watch it happen in the search terms people arrive on. Every winter we get visitors who typed apre ski, apreski, apresski, aprés ski, aprea ski, apree ski or simply apre. Not one is correct. Every one was understood anyway.

The variants, from nearly right to nowhere near:

• apres ski — no accent, no hyphen. The standard English form in practice, even though it is technically wrong.
• apres-ski, après ski — mixed forms, each missing one of the two.
• apreski, apresski, apre ski — the word boundary disappears. “Apreski” is a real search term, typed often enough that this page ranks first for it.
• aprés ski — the accent leans the wrong way. Very common, and it changes the sound; more on that below.
• Abriss-Ski, Abriss Ski, Abreschie — the German versions, where the ear took over completely. They get their own chapter, which is next.

Abriss-Ski: what German ears hear

German produces the one genuine mondegreen this word has. Spoken, après-ski sounds like “a-preh-shee”, and a German ear reaches for the nearest German word: Abriss — demolition, a teardown. The good part is that the mistake makes sense. “Abriss” is party slang in its own right — in none of the big dictionaries, but everybody knows it: “Abriss machen” means going properly hard. So anyone writing “Abriss-Ski” accidentally describes, with some precision, what goes on in certain huts from four in the afternoon onwards.

We like that version more than we probably should. It is wrong, but it is honest.

For our sort of afternoon it misses the point, though. The best part of apres is not how hard anybody went, it is that everyone came down off the same mountain and now tells each other what happened up there. That needs no demolition. It needs a round that starts at the same moment. Four places, one command, done.

Apres bar, apres club, apres all day: apres without the ski

This is where American English has taken the word furthest. “Apres” has come loose from the ski and turned into a word of its own — a mood, a slot in the day, the stretch when the effort is over and the people are still together. It gets stuck in front of almost anything. Here is what each one means:

• Apres bar, apres club, apres party, apres food — the places, all of them the daylight version of going out: early, loud, still in your kit, everybody straight off the mountain. An apres bar sits at the bottom of the slope. An apres club is not a nightclub but a club that runs in the afternoon. An apres party follows an activity instead of a dinner. Apres food is what goes with it: hot, salty, fast.
• Apres all day, apres vibes, apres approved, apres chic — the lifestyle end, and the reason the word escaped the mountains. Apres all day is the joke that became a slogan: keep the good part of the day, skip the sport. It names an event series in Vail and a podcast; All About Après is a lifestyle brand; Après Govnr's Park is a bar in Denver, miles from the nearest lift. Apres vibes is the feeling those places sell — tired, warm, loud, in company. Apres approved is used as a seal of approval for gear or a venue that delivers it, and apres chic is the dress code: built for a bar at four, not a piste at ten.
• Apres bike, apres sail, apres beach, apres hike, apres golf, apres hockey, apres baseball, apres soccer, apres sport, apres piste, apres shift, apres coffee, apres sea — the pattern with a different activity in front. All of them mean the same thing: the sociable part once that activity is done. Après-Bike parties show up in German bike-park programmes, the sailing press writes Après-Sail, apres piste is apres-ski with the French word for the slope, apres sea the harbour version. Apres hockey, apres baseball and apres soccer are American additions with no snow involved, apres shift drops the sport entirely — bar staff, kitchen crews, nurses — and apres coffee is the pause after the cup. Only golf resisted: English had that slot covered with the nineteenth hole.

The prefix itself is perfectly ordinary in French and still productive there — après-vente (after-sales), après-rasage, après-guerre. What is not French is this particular use: après plus a sport, meaning the sociable hours afterwards. For that the French reach for other words.

What all of these have in common: they describe what happens to the people afterwards, never the activity. You did something together, and now you sit together. That is why the word travels so easily from one sport to the next — and why none of it needs a mountain.

How other countries use the word

The French word has travelled across half of Europe, and every country has handled it a little differently:

• Germany and Austria built the loud hut version in the first place — then turned the word into a different word altogether, Abriss-Ski, as above. No other language goes that far.
• Norway says “afterski” — half English, half homemade. The French après is the exception there: it surfaces in resort marketing, while what people say and search for is afterski.
• Italy says “après-ski”, the French word, without italianising it. Doposcì does exist — but it refers to the clothing, in the plural to the lined boots.
• The Netherlands go further than anybody: there the word became a verb. Après-skiën is conjugated like any other — ik après-ski, wij après-skiën. The dictionary prints the accent; hardly anyone types it.
• France, where the whole thing comes from, mostly means the footwear: ask for les après-skis and you get boots. For the sociable part the French use other words, which is why a French skier will occasionally ask what the rest of Europe thinks it is saying.

So English is not the only language that has bent this word. It is simply the one that bent the spelling instead of the meaning.

How to spell it, how to say it

The correct form is “après-ski” — accent grave on the e, hyphen in the middle. That is what the French dictionaries have, and the German Duden lists no alternative either. In English, as above, the accent-free “apres ski” is what people actually write, resort marketing included.

The mistake that does give people away is not the missing accent but the reversed one: “aprés” with an accent aigu, the stroke leaning right. In French the direction of that stroke decides the sound. The accent grave (è) gives an open e as in “bet”, the accent aigu (é) a closed one as in “day”. So “aprés” would come out as “a-pray” — which is not how anybody says it.

Out loud it is “a-preh skee”: the s in “après” stays silent, and the ski on the end is just a ski. In German it becomes “a-preh-shee”, because German pronounces “Ski” as “shee” — which is why the German misspelling “Abreschie” gets the second half exactly right and only the “Ab” at the front wrong. The Duden transcribes it [ˈaprɛʃiː]. The long version, with every variant, is in our big apres ski guide.

One observation from real life: nobody has ever complained about a misplaced accent on a hut terrace. The word is almost only written down by people who want to sell something — signs, posters, shops like ours. That is why the wrong spellings hold on: whoever would have to get it right rarely writes it, and whoever says it daily never writes it.

Why we are called “Apres Allstars” — without the accent

We get asked often enough, so here is the answer: we leave the accent off on purpose. A brand name nobody can find on a keyboard is a bad brand name — and an accent that turns into a question mark in half the systems it passes through is a practical problem, not a design decision.

The second half matters more to us. “Allstars” comes from the way this sport works: skiing is an individual sport in which you are watched the whole time. Above you sit people on a lift with nothing to do but look down — and everybody takes the section under the lift a little differently. Which makes every single person on that mountain a small hero: the one who took the steep line, the one who went around it, and the one who fell over getting off the chair, obviously.

Apres is where that heroism gets celebrated together afterwards. That is why we are Apres Allstars, and why we build things you cannot use on your own — the SwigSki3000®, for example, or the ski boot glasses with bindings that hang around your neck.

The whole story behind it — a mountain pasture in the Chiemgau, our own lift, ISPO 2020 — is in the article on how apres ski came about.

Common questions

What does apres mean?

Apres — correctly written après — is the French word for “after”, and that is the whole story. It sits inside plenty of expressions: après-midi is the afternoon, après-demain the day after tomorrow, après-rasage is aftershave. “Après-ski” accordingly means, literally, “after the ski”.

What does apres all day mean?

It is a joke that turned into a slogan: keep the good part of the day, skip the sport. “Apres all day” describes staying in the sociable after-hours mode from morning until night, and it is also the name of an event series in Vail and of a podcast. Nobody means it as a serious claim — it belongs on a hoodie.

What do apres bar, apres club and apres party mean?

All three describe the daylight version of going out: early, loud, still in your kit, everybody straight off the mountain. An apres bar sits at the bottom of the slope, an apres club is not a nightclub but a club that runs in the afternoon, and an apres party follows an activity rather than a dinner.

Is it apres or après?

Correct French is “après” with an accent grave, and “après-ski” with a hyphen. In English the accent-free “apres ski” is what almost everybody writes — in our own search data it beats the accented form by around ten to one in the UK and thirty to one in the US. The only spelling that truly goes wrong is “aprés” with the accent leaning the other way, because that flips the sound of the e.

How do you pronounce apres?

“a-preh”, with a short open e as in “bet”, and a silent s at the end. Together with the ski: “a-preh skee”. In German it becomes “a-preh-shee”, because German pronounces “Ski” as “shee” — which is how the misspelling “Abreschie” came about.

Why is it Apres Allstars and not Après Allstars?

Because a brand name has to be typeable. The accent grave disappears in a lot of systems or turns into a question mark, which inside a name is a practical problem rather than a style choice. In running text we write it where it belongs.

Sources & status

Research as of September 2026. Spelling, pronunciation and word class of “après-ski” in German according to the Duden. Etymology (late Latin ad pressum, “tout près”) according to the CNRTL. The French example words and the two senses of après-ski — the time after a day on the slopes in the singular, lined boots in the plural — according to Larousse, Le Robert, the Wiktionnaire and the Dictionnaire de l'Académie française, which lists the boot only. The English first attestation (1951 and 1954 respectively) according to Merriam-Webster and the Oxford English Dictionary. The terms mondegreen and eggcorn, with the Hendrix example, according to standard linguistic literature. “Abriss” in the sense of heavy celebrating is colloquial German and in none of the major dictionaries; its use is documented through youth-slang collections. Language comparison: Norwegian afterski according to Det Norske Akademis ordbok, Italian doposcì according to Treccani, Dutch après-skiën according to the Algemeen Nederlands Woordenboek. Spelling ratios, misspellings and the apres [something] search terms come from the queries readers land on our pages with (Google Search Console, own data, rolling twelve months). The American examples are publicly listed venues and brands. Everything about our own brand and history is first-hand experience.