H-aspiré words can be roughly described as words which phonetically begin with a vowel, but behave as if they began with a consonant. Thus, as Table E.1 illustrates, regular vowel-initial words allow elision and liaison, but h-aspiré words do not (just like consonant-initial words).

Regular vowel-initial words also require the use of special forms for some determiners and adjectives occurring immediately before them. For example, the masculine noun arbre must be used with cet ‘this’ (and not ce), with vieil ‘old’ and bel ‘beautiful’ (and not vieux or beau), and the feminine noun arme ‘weapon’ must be used with son ‘his/her’ (and not sa): cet arbre, ce vieil arbre, ce bel arbre, son arme (compare with consonant-initial nouns like the masculine tapis and the feminine table ‘table’: ce tapis, ce vieux tapis, ce beau tapis; sa table). Here too, h-aspiré words behave like consonant-initial words, as the masculine héros and the feminine hache ‘axe’ show in the following examples: ce héros, ce vieux héros, ce beau héros; sa hache.

Table E.2 presents a list of relatively common h-aspiré words divided for convenience into parts of speech.

Note that derivatives of h-aspiré words are generally h-aspiré words themselves: for example, hautain and hauteur are h-aspiré words, like haut; hacher and hachoir ‘grinder’ are h-aspiré words, like hache. Notable exceptions to this general principle are the derivatives of the word héros, which are not h-aspiré words: cf. l'héroïne ‘the heroine’, l'héroïsme ‘heroism’.