dictionary

Forty years after they began the task – and nearly four hundred years after receiving their first commission – sages in Paris have finally produced a new edition of the definitive French dictionary.

Their task at the start was to “give certain rules to our language, to render it pure and eloquent” – to which end they set about writing their first dictionary.

Under its president, the writer Amin Maalouf, the dictionary committee meets every Thursday morning and after discussion gives its ruling on definitions that have been drawn up in preliminary form by outside experts.

In its press release, the Academy said the dictionary is a “mirror of an epoch running from the 1950s up to today,” and boasts 21,000 new entries compared to the 1935 version.

Likewise the third section of the new dictionary – including the letter M – defines marriage as a union between a man and a woman, which in France it no longer is.