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Dictionarium latinogallicum
Robert Estienne, 1552

Electronic access to this early French dictionary is provided by the ARTFL Project at the University of Chicago.

Data capture of Robert Estienne's Dictionarium latinogallicum (1552) was completed by Professor T.R. Wooldridge of the University of Toronto, who has provided extensive editorial assistance for this project. First-stage data capture was done at Analyses et Traitements Informatiques du Lexique Français (ATILF) of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS, formerly the Institut national de la langue française). For further information, consult the Site Estienne-Nicot, maintained by Professor Wooldridge at the University of Toronto, which includes extensive documentation and sample images taken from the original editions of the main dictionaries of Estienne and Jean Nicot.

Historical Significance

The third edition (1552) of Robert Estienne's Dictionarium latinogallicum marks the culmination of his work on the Latin-French dictionary. Estienne, the father of modern Classical Latin and French lexicography (cf. Starnes 1954), had established for Classical Latin and 16th-century French a tripartite series of dictionaries: for Latin a monolingual Thesaurus intended for scholars, and two Latin-French dictionaries, one, the Dictionarium latinogallicum, for advanced students, and an abridged version, the Dictionariolum puerorum latinogallicum, for beginners; for French, Estienne quickly followed the first edition of the Dictionarium with the first of his Dictionaire francoislatin, and that of the Dictionariolum with the first of Les mots francois tournez en Latin pour les enfants (subsequently Petit dictionaire...). The desire to realize a French equivalent of the Thesaurus was expressed early on; Nicot's Thresor de la langue françoyse of 1606, a predominantly monolingual expansion of the Dictionaire francoislatin, was the nearest that the Renaissance was able to manage at this level; it wasn't until near the end of the 17th century that a true monolingual dictionary of general French was in fact achievable (Richelet 1680, Furetière 1690, Académie française 1694). The filiation of Estienne's dictionaries and subsequent editions can be seen in Figure 1 (taken from Wooldridge 1992/1996: 1); a diagram of the two series of Estienne's tripartite system can be seen in Figure 2 (taken from Wooldridge 1977/1997: 1.5).

From the point of view of the French lexicon, the Dictionarium latinogallicum is especially interesting for the number of items that are not present in either the Dictionaire francoislatin or the Thresor. All of them are of course "hidden", as the dictionary's headwords are Latin. Particular features of the French include: a) the gathering together of synonyms (Figure 3a); b) regional, popular and technical terms (Figure 3b). An analytical example of the structure of the entries in the Dictionarium is given in Figure 4 (taken from Wooldridge 1992/1996: 2.3.1).

The present database, giving full-text access to the Dictionarium (and therefore to the French items, as well as the Latin), comprises only those paragraphs of the dictionary containing French, roughly half of the whole text. The Latin-French items, those of the database, contain approximately 860,000 words.

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Further Reading

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