Dictionnaire de l'Académie

About Dictionnaire de l'Académie

This app provides on-line access to all nine complete editions of the Dictionnaire de l’Académie française (from the first edition, published in 1694, to the ninth, completed in 2024), comprising 20 printed volumes and more than 250,000 entries spanning three centuries of the history of the French language.

The Dictionnaire de l’Académie française is one of the oldest dictionaries of the French language. It is a matchless tool for the study of French and the way it has evolved.
The digital version is an essential reference for all speakers, teachers and learners of French.

A DICTIONARY FOR TODAY
The ninth edition, which boasts 53,000 entries including 21,000 new words, features:
• clear definitions giving the different meanings of words in simple, precise French
• a wealth of examples illustrating the main uses of and forms of words, as well as the commonly used idioms in which they appear
• the conjugations, in all moods and tenses, of all French verbs, as well as irregular plurals and complex pronunciations
• comments highlighting incorrect or substandard usage and offering French equivalents for anglicisms
• rectified spellings resulting from the 1990 spelling reform
• a wealth of hyperlinks to on-line terminological resources (FranceTerme database), words used in French-speaking countries outside France (base de données lexicographiques panfrancophone, B.D.L.P.) and difficulties inherent in the French language (Dire, Ne pas dire notes published by the Académie Française).

INSIGHTS INTO THE HISTORY OF WORDS
Readers can consult:
• detailed etymological notes giving the origins of words and the point at which they first appeared in French
• the treatment of the same word in different editions of the dictionary, which can be consulted in both text mode and image mode (with access to scanned pages), making it possible to observe how the meanings and spellings of a word have evolved.

A FREELY ACCESSIBLE, EASY-TO-USE DIGITAL PORTAL that allows you to:
• easily look up a word in the “super-wordlist” covering all the dictionary’s editions, by keying the first few letters or by activating the spellchecker
• browse the dictionary freely using the hypertext function, which makes it possible to click on any word to access the corresponding entry
• perform advanced searches across the entire corpus, thanks to sophisticated search functions that allow you to specify and combine different criteria (full text search, search by entry, search by field, etc.).

Note: the app requires an internet connection. It is perfectly adapted for use on mobile and touchscreen devices, and also features accessibility functions.