French Language Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for students, teachers, and linguists wanting to discuss the finer points of the French language. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
I can't seem to find a proper 1-word French translation of "hectic" in the sense of 'with disjointed feverish agitation'. Context: talking about a very agitated period of someone's life, possibly a bad one.
The French word "hectique" apparently only refers to some kind of feverish medical condition...
The words I found in dictionaries such as mouvementé, trépidant, agité, survolté do not account for the feverish sense of this word.
Although “tumultueux/euse” is probably used more often to describe such years or eras in world history or to describe someone’s entire life (as in the title of this film) than it is to describe a particular part of someone’s life, this entry from Word Reference makes a connection between that French adjective and hectic:
tumultueux adj littéraire (riche en événements)
tumultuous, eventful adj
hectic, turbulent adj
(here's another link to the film mentioned above which translates the original French title, La tumultueuse vie d'un déflaté, to The Hectic Life of a Dismissed Worker in English)
Context: talking about a very agitated period of s.o.'s life, possibly a bad one.
You can use « mouvementé » then. This is the most appropriate word French speakers would use. For instance : « une période mouvementée » (when refering to someone's life).
A few words exist :
Mouvementé
Can refer to what you mean, can be quite pejorative.
Agité
But it's difficult to replace 'hectic' directly with 'agité', you would have to change the whole expression for it to fit.
Trépidant
Not especially pejorative, this is what I would use instead, unless you want it to be pejorative ; in that case, consider using 'mouvementé'.
I think "maniaque" would match your description.
