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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.
The full ninth edition of the
Dictionnaire de l’Académie Française
was formally presented to President Macron this afternoon in the plush surroundings of the 17th century Collège des Quatre-Nations on the left bank of the Seine.

“The effort is praiseworthy, but so excessively tardy that it is perfectly useless,” a collective of linguists wrote in the Liberation newspaper on Thursday.
This ninth edition replaces the eighth, which was completed in 1935.
Work started in 1986, and three previous sections
– up to the letter R
– have already been issued.
Today the end section (last entry Zzz) has been added, meaning the work is complete.

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.
But many of the “modern” words added in the 1980s or 90s are already out of date.
And such is the pace of linguistic change, many words in current use today are too new to make it in.
Thus common words like tiktokeur, vlog, smartphone and émoji
– which are all in the latest commercial dictionaries
– do not exist in the Académie book.
Conversely its “new” words include such go-ahead concepts as soda, sauna, yuppie and supérette (mini-supermarket).
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cly03ve799go

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