The Académie française is France's official authority on the usages, vocabulary, and grammar of the French language, although its recommendations carry no legal power. Sometimes, even governmental authorities disregard the Académie's rulings. As of 2021[update] the eighth edition of 1935 is the latest complete edition, with the ninth edition in progress, available online up to Sérénissime.[1]
Publication
A special Commission (Commission du dictionnaire) composed of several (but not all) of the members of the Académie undertakes the compilation of the dictionary. It has published thirteen editions of the dictionary, of which three were preliminary, eight were complete, and two were supplements for specialised words.[2] The completed edition of the Dictionnaire de l'Académie française, the first official dictionary of the French language, was presented upon completion by the Académie to King Louis XIV. [3] on 24 August 1694.
Preliminary editions:
Le Dictionnaire de l'Académie françoise (from A to Aversion), pre-edition, Frankfurt am Main, 1687
Le Dictionnaire de l'Académie françoise (from A to Confiture), pre-edition, Frankfurt am Main, 1687
Le Dictionnaire de l'Académie françoise (from A to Neuf), pre-edition, Paris, 1687
Vocabulaire de la langue française; par MM. Nodier et Ackermann, Paris, 1868
Complete editions:
Le Dictionnaire de l'Académie françoise dedié au Roy (1st edition), Paris, 1694
Nouveau Dictionnaire de l'Académie françoise dedié au Roy (2nd edition), Paris, 1718
Le Dictionnaire de l'Académie françoise (3rd edition), Paris, 1740
Le Dictionnaire de l'Académie françoise (4th edition), Paris, 1762
Le Dictionnaire de l'Académie françoise (5th edition), Paris, 1798
Dictionnaire de l'Académie française (6th edition), Paris, 1835
Dictionnaire de l'Académie française (7th edition), Paris, 1879
Dictionnaire de l'Académie française (8th edition), Paris, 1932–1935
Supplementary editions for the sciences, arts, and technology:
Corneille, Thomas, Le Dictionnaire des Arts et des Sciences, Paris, 1694
Barré, Louis, Complément du Dictionnaire de l'Académie française, Paris, 1842
In 1778, the Académie attempted to compile a "historical dictionary" of the French language. The project was later abandoned, having failed to progress beyond the letter "A".
The 8th edition of 1935 contained approximately 35,000 words. The Académie continues work on the ninth edition, begun in 1986, of which the first volume (A to Enzyme) was published in 1992 (ISBN2-213-62142-X), the second (Éocène to Mappemonde) in 2000 (ISBN2-213-62143-8), and the third (Maquereau to Quotité) in 2011 (ISBN2-213-66640-7). As the work goes on, additional parts of the Dictionnaire are published in the Documents administratifs of the Journal Officiel, and posted online. The finalised ninth edition is expected to contain about 28,000 new words (60,000 in total). In part because the current edition dates from 1935, other dictionaries (such as those published by Larousse and Le Robert) are more commonly used as everyday reference sources than that of the Académie.
The ninth edition was presented by the Académie Française to French president Emmanuel Macron on 14 November 2024.[4]
Encoding
The IETF language tags have registered fr-1694acad for Early Modern French, "17th century French, as catalogued in the "Dictionnaire de l'académie françoise", 4eme ed. 1694; frequently includes elements of Middle French, as this is a transitional period".[5]
University of Chicago, The ARTFL Project, Dictionnaires d'autrefois, Full text, searchable French dictionaries of the 17th, 18th, 19th and 20th centuries. Includes: Dictionnaire de L'Académie française: 1st (1694), 4th (1762), 5th (1798), 6th (1835), and 8th (1932–5) editions; Jean Nicot's Thresor de la langue française (1606), Jean-François Féraud's Dictionaire critique de la langue française (1787–1788), and Émile Littré's Dictionnaire de la langue française (1872–1877)
