Adjectives describe quantity, adequacy, sequence, order, quality, and word emphasis. Thus, the selection of the proper adjective must begin by finding the criteria which accord with the semantic aspects. In French, adjectives with triste 'sad' as the superordinate also have various hyponyms such as affligeant and chagrin. This study examined the similarities and differences in the adjective-meaning triste in French, so that learners can use the right words in their expressions of sadness. Qualitatively, the data were taken from the French-Indonesian bilingual dictionary by Lefort and Fatmawati (2016) with reference to Le Robert de Poche Plus and were analyzed with the theories of Lehrer semantic field, Nida's (1979) semantic components analysis, and Santangelo's (1995) emotion. The findings showed that, from 21 adjectives describing triste in the bilingual dictionary, it was found that there was a great diversity of sad adjectives containing their features and causal factors accompanying a kind of sadness, such as disappointment, sorrow, suffer. Some vocabularies were also used for certain situations, i.e., economic factors, moods, loss.