bruire

A literary, somewhat old-fashioned verb for a soft rustling or murmuring sound — les feuilles bruissent, la forêt bruit de mille bruits — mostly found in descriptive or poetic writing about nature. Its conjugation table is famously incomplete, so bruisser fills in the forms it lacks in modern usage.

• Les feuilles bruissaient doucement dans le vent. — The leaves rustled softly in the wind.
• La forêt bruissait de mille bruits légers. — The forest murmured with a thousand faint sounds.
• On entendait la rivière bruire au loin. — You could hear the river murmuring in the distance.

Bruire has a notoriously incomplete conjugation (many tenses/persons simply don't exist in standard usage) — for the forms bruire lacks, modern French reaches for its regularized cousin bruisser instead of forcing a nonstandard form.

Often confused with bruisser.