History of the Text

Jean Nicot's Thresor de la langue françoyse, tant ancienne que moderne (Paris, David Douceur, 1606) is the key to the development of French lexicography. The sum of four editions of Robert Estienne's bilingual Dictionaire françois-latin (first edition 1539; the word dictionaire entered the French language with the appearance of the first comprehensive inventory of French words), the Thresor assumed, through the contributions of Nicot, the nature of a monolingual French dictionary. Nicot's contributions--added to the general vocabulary recorded by Estienne--concern particularly nautical, legal, political-history, natural-history, geographic, architectural, military, chivalric, hunting, and falconry terms, as well as general and poetical vocabulary, both archaic and current. This vocabulary and the accompanying commentaries are illustrated by references to over 200 sources of all periods (from Homer on) and of various linguistic origins besides French, and to analagous words in French dialects and other European languages.

The information that Nicot gives for headwords includes definitions, examples, descriptive and normative remarks on orthography, pronunciation and usage, and etymological, historical, and encyclopedic commentaries. The bilingual dictionary had become, in the mind of its reviser, an historical treasury of the French language. The lexical descriptions and the dictionary methodology introduced by the Thresor opened the way for the first truly monolingual general dictionaries of French, all appearing within a few years of each other at the end of the seventeenth century, of Richelet (1680), Furetière (1690) and the Académie française (1694). (See also the ARTFL Project's versions of the first (1694), fourth (1762), and fifth (1798) editions of the Dictionnaire de l'Académie française .)

The Thresor de la langue française contains about 18,200 headword entries. The text contains about 1.2 million words.

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