About the evolution of the semantics of some phraseological units of the French language

The purpose of this article was to show the current meanings of a number of commonly used phraseological units in the French language, which are recorded by almost all explanatory and phraseological dictionaries, but sometimes with an insufficient degree of reliability. The article shows the ways of developing new meanings of phraseological units and describes ways to rethink free phrases on the basis of which these phraseological units were formed. The study was carried out with the involvement of cultural information, without which, in some cases, clarifying the semantics of a particular phraseological unit would be speculative.