Dictionnaire universel

Also known as Furetiere's Dictionary

Furetiere was an academician working on the Academy's own dictionary when he decided that a dictionary of French ought to include the words used by French people at work.

The Academy's project excluded technical vocabulary as beneath the dignity of the language. Furetiere compiled his own including it, obtained a royal privilege to print, and was expelled from the Academy in 1685 for breaching its monopoly. He fought the case for three years and died before the book appeared.

It was printed in Holland, outside French jurisdiction. It is a better dictionary than the one he was expelled for rivalling.

Compiled by: Antoine Furetiere
Kind: Dictionary
Date: 1690, published two years after his death
Look things up: Alphabetical
Arrangement: Alphabetical
Made by: One compiler
Published in: The Hague and Rotterdam
Language: French
Extent: 3 folio volumes; some 40,000 entries
Form: Printed folio
Latest edition: Basnage and Brutel de la Rivière revisions; facsimile of the 1690 edition, 1978
Original title: Dictionnaire universel, contenant généralement tous les mots françois tant vieux que modernes, et les termes de toutes les sciences et des arts

A specimen

The title claims all French words, old and modern, and the terms of every science and art - and the book delivers on it: the vocabulary of the joiner, the weaver, the falconer, the printer, the sailor, the apothecary, the mathematician.
The Academy's dictionary, appearing four years later, admitted almost none of it. Two conceptions of what a language consists of, published within a presidency of each other.

Title and scope, Dictionnaire universel, 1690. Public domain.

The problem it solved

The Academy had spent fifty years on a dictionary that deliberately left out most of the language.

Its brief was to fix and purify French, and it interpreted that as recording the usage of good writers and polite society. Technical terms, the vocabulary of trades, regional words, and anything smelling of the workshop were excluded as not belonging to the language proper. The project had also been going since 1635 with no end in sight.

That left a large and growing gap. The seventeenth century was producing an enormous technical and scientific literature in French, and readers encountered the vocabulary of navigation, fortification, anatomy, chemistry, law, printing and a hundred crafts. None of it was in any dictionary, because the only dictionary being made was refusing it on principle.

There was also a question about what a dictionary is FOR that nobody had put clearly. If the purpose is to model good style, exclusion makes sense. If the purpose is to explain words a reader may meet, exclusion is simply failure.

And the Academy held a royal privilege - a legal monopoly on French dictionaries - which meant the question could not be settled by competition unless somebody was prepared to break the law.

There was also a class dimension nobody at the Academy stated plainly. The vocabulary being excluded was the vocabulary of people who worked with their hands, and a dictionary defining the language as what polite society said was making a claim about who owned it.

The Academy's slowness was itself part of the provocation. Fifty-five years without a published dictionary had left a vacuum that somebody was going to fill, and the monopoly was protecting a work that did not yet exist.

Nor was there any agreement about whether a dictionary should describe things at all. The Academy's position was that a dictionary defines words and an encyclopaedia describes things, and that mixing them was a category error rather than a service.

And the crafts themselves had no written vocabulary of their own. Trade terms were transmitted by apprenticeship and existed nowhere on paper, so recording them required going to the workshop rather than to a library.

The work itself

Furetiere included everything, and explained the things as well as the words.

Some forty thousand entries across three folio volumes, covering ordinary vocabulary, obsolete words, and above all the terms of the sciences and the arts - by which the period meant crafts and trades as much as learning. The entry on a technical term frequently explains the process or the object, so the dictionary shades continuously into an encyclopaedia.

That is the second innovation and it is deliberate. Furetiere argues that you cannot define a technical word without describing what it names, and the consequence is a book that tells you how things are made and how they work. It sits directly between a dictionary of words and an encyclopaedia of things, and both of the great eighteenth-century projects took the hint.

He also gives examples and citations, drawn widely rather than from an approved canon, and includes proverbs and idioms.

The legal history shaped the book physically. Expelled from the Academy in 1685, unable to print in France, Furetiere died in 1688 with the work unpublished; it appeared in the Netherlands in 1690 through the Protestant publishing network that also carried Bayle. The Academy's own dictionary came out in 1694.

His sources for the technical material were the practitioners. Furetiere questioned craftsmen and specialists about their terms, which is why the entries are accurate about processes in a way that a compiler working from books could not have managed.

The definitions of processes also required a decision about length. Explaining how a thing is made takes several times the space of glossing a word, and Furetiere accepted three folio volumes as the price - which is why the encyclopaedic dictionary is a large-format genre from the start.

The posthumous publication also means the text was seen through the press by others, and the editions that followed within a decade were revised by Protestant scholars in the Netherlands - so the book that circulated was already not quite the one he wrote.

The obsolete vocabulary is the other half of the title's claim and is easy to overlook. Furetiere included old words as well as technical ones, on the same reasoning: a reader meets them in older books and needs them explained, whatever the Academy thinks of their standing.

What followed

It won the argument comprehensively. The Dictionnaire de Trevoux, an expanded Jesuit revision, carried Furetiere's approach through the eighteenth century in edition after edition. Every general dictionary since includes technical vocabulary, and nobody now thinks it a question.

Its more consequential descendant is the encyclopaedia. Chambers's Cyclopaedia of 1728 and then the Encyclopedie of 1751 both do what Furetiere had done - explain the thing while defining the word, with particular attention to crafts and processes - and Diderot's plates documenting workshop practice are the fullest expression of the principle he was expelled for.

The Academy's dictionary, meanwhile, went through its own long history of exclusion and gradual concession, and is now on its ninth edition.

The episode is the clearest case in this section of an institution's conception of a reference work losing to an individual's. The Academy asked what French ought to be. Furetiere asked what a reader would need to look up. The second question has beaten the first every time it has been posed since - in Webster's Third, in the OED's admission of slang, in every dictionary that has taken descriptive coverage over prescriptive selection.

He also wrote satires about the Academy while the case was running, which cannot have helped.

The Trevoux revision also shows how quickly the argument was conceded. Within twelve years Furetiere's dictionary was being expanded by Jesuits who had opposed him, under a different title, with the technical vocabulary intact and growing.

His expulsion also became a standing reference in French literary history, cited whenever the Academy's authority is questioned - so the punishment did rather more for his reputation than membership would have.

And the question it settled has had to be settled repeatedly since. Every argument about whether a dictionary should admit slang, jargon, dialect or new coinages is the same argument, and it has gone the same way every time.

It also stands as the section's clearest case of a reference work whose importance is inseparable from the fight it caused. The dictionary is good; the argument about what a dictionary is for is what changed the field.