For years, my primary source for looking up French words and expressions has been the online language forum WordReference.com. For any French word I don’t recognize, the platform provides synonyms, the English translation, sample sentences, and a range of expressions that utilize the word. If that doesn’t suffice, the same page provides links to discussion forums for any number of additional expressions not included in the pre-approved list. Here, translators debate the best way to interpret a particular saying, and users can approve or disapprove of the various interpretations.
This digital, crowd-sourced resource is hard to beat. You don’t even have to know how to spell a word correctly. If you’re close, WordReference provides you with a list of possible matching words to choose from. Yet, there are still publishing houses in France that employ teams of linguists, lexicographers, terminologists, sociologists, and other specialists who decide which words to add and which to eliminate in their regularly updated dictionaries.
This month, LiRE magazine features several stories related to the evolution of French dictionaries—such as Robert, Larousse, and Hachette—and the process of deciding which words to keep and which to remove.
The Influence of English and the Internet
According to a poll conducted by LiRE, around 90% of French people are well aware that each new dictionary edition contains words that weren’t previously accepted. Publishers choose the new entries after carefully studying tens of thousands of possibilities. For the field of medicine alone, for example, the director of French language at Larousse claims they consider between 5,000 and 6,000 new words every year. To be accepted into a new edition…
« Le mot sélectionné doit être massivement utilisé et également partagé. S’il entre dans le dictionnaire, c’est qu’il est utilisé par toutes les générations et par différentes catégories socio-professionnelles. »
— Carine Girac-Marinier, directrice du département langue française, beaux livres & dictionnaires chez Larousse
“The chosen word must be massively used and equally shared. If it’s in the dictionary, it’s because it is used by members of every generation and by different socio-professional groups.”
—Carine Girac-Marinier, Director of the French Language, Beautiful Books, and Dictionaries Department at Larousse
English words occupy the lion’s share of new words being added, especially if those words are widely used across the Internet. The following words now appear in French dictionaries. The table below, however, shows the percentage of French people who believe a given word has been officially accepted.
autotune
30.9%
playlist
78.2%
bitcoin
73.3%
chatbot
53.4%
scud
(a verbal attack)
16.4%
Googliser
(‘er’ verb, to Google)
32.4%
liker
(‘er’ verb, to put a like on a social media entry)
68.6%
spoiler
(‘er’ verb, to ruin a reader’s or spectator’s experience by divulging a part of the plot)
73%
These last two verbs seem particularly ugly. And indeed, the Québécois, who are even more protective of their native tongue than the French, have created an elegant alternative to “spoiler.” Instead, they use divulgâcher, a compounding of divulguer (to divulge) and gâcher (to spoil).
New Words Arising From The Francophone World
The Québecois are hardly the only French speakers to invent new terminology. New words continually spring up throughout the Francophone world. According to Bernard Cerquiglini, a linguist and scientific advisor for the illustrated Petit Larousse, in order for a new word to be added to a new edition…
« Il faut que le mot soit attesté à l’oral et à l’écrit dans les pays d’origine, en dehors d’un milieu particulier, et qu’il soit utilisé dans la presse, et entendu à la radio ou à la télévision. »
—Bernard Cerquiglini
“The word must be proven to be in use in both oral and written contexts in the country of origin, used beyond a particular domain, must appear in the press, and be heard on the radio or on TV.”
—Bernard Cerquiglini
Many of these words may be unknown to people living in mainland France. Yet, they can still appear in a new edition of Le Petit Larousse illustré if editors believe the term has merit and is likely to catch on. Over the last thirty years, editors have added more francophone formulations to the student-centric dictionary than anglicisms. Below are some of the latest entries.
nareux/nareuse
(adjective or noun originating in Belgium and northeast France)
Someone who is easily disgusted by improperly washed food or silverware.
débarouler
(verb originating in Lyon)
To hurtle down a staircase.
agender
(verb originating in Switzerland)
To add an entry to your planner, the word for which is agenda in French.
s’astruquer
(reflexive verb originating in Belgium)
To choke on food or drink.
liboké
(adjective originating from the languages spoken by Bantu people in Africa)
A way of preparing meat or fish by wrapping it in a banana leaf.
bêtiser
(verb originating in Haiti)
To do stupid things. A more efficient version of the long-accepted faire des bêtises.
cadeauter
(verb originating in Africa)
To give someone a gift (cadeau).
champignonneur
(noun originating in Switzerland)
A person who likes to gather mushrooms (champignons).
A Perpetual Pruning
A lesser-known process when creating a new dictionary edition is the elimination of old words to make way for the new. In that same poll, conducted by LiRE, very few French people (around 10%) were aware of such linguistic cuts. I was surprised to read that a verb I recognized, larmoyer (to snivel and lament), has been kicked to the curb. This has also been the fate of the verb rossignoler, which I assume means to sing like a rossignol (or nightingale). I bet more than a few people larmoyé’d over that one.
The verb platoniser, which means to imitate or follow Plato, seems worthy of oblivion, as might be people who platonise all the time for no good reason. And, abalourdir, a verb that means to turn someone into an oaf, has been deemed no longer needed. I can live with that, but apparently 20% of French people polled want it added back in.
Despite the careful curation, no word is safe from becoming obsolete. Language evolves, and even the experts sometimes get it wrong. Will ‘captcha‘, ‘hackathon‘, and ‘postulance‘ (the act of applying for a position) survive the test of time? Currently, only 42.4%, 9.8%, and 20.7% (respectively) of those polled were familiar with these words. While the linguistic dust swirls and settles and swirls again, I’ll leave such determinations to those in the know and continue to rely on WordReference for nearly all of my French vocabulary needs.
In the dictionary, the word ‘fat’ is in a fat font. So is the word ‘skinny’.
The word ‘absent’ is present, ‘minuscule’ is written in upper case, and ‘abbreviation’ is spelled out.
For the word ‘nothing’, there is something. The word ‘printed’ is so, while the word ‘erase’ is not.
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Really impressive work, Carol. Very interesting.
Glad you enjoyed it. Thanks for stopping by.
Your article is timely! In my French book club this week one of the members used “spoiler,” the first time I have heard it. I’ve shared your article with the group so in future we can use divulgâcher 🙂
Good to know Keith. Bonne lecture!
Interesting article. Language is living, breathing, confusing, fascinating . . .
Excellent. J’avais oublié “débarouler”… I wonder whether the word “gone”. un gone, des gones (enfants, gamins à Lyon), is in the dictionnaire… Haven’t opened one in ages…
Quand au Chat de Geluck… (Un Belge) j’adore. Toujours.
(Back from Paris already?)
Bon weekend…
Such issues always present challenges for writers of dictionaries, especially for a language like French where questions of correctness can get heated sometimes. I remember the discussion in The Story of French on how the Academie Française tended to lag decades behind usage, for example not accepting le vapeur for “steamship” until the word had largely dropped out of use anyway because steamships themselves were obsolete.
If they accept words from dialects outside France in certain cases (as with your African and Haïtian examples), they also have to deal with the issue of how different a dialect has to be before it’s classified as a separate language and not a form of French any more. For example, I’ve heard that the Cajun (Louisiana) and Haïtian dialects are almost unintelligible to people from France. It’s also hard to imagine that words from remote African countries would commonly get adopted in France, unless France gets a lot of immigrants who use the word.
On the issue of new words to replace old ones, one thing I’ve noticed about English is that people will generally only accept a new word if it’s shorter than the one it replaces. For example, people readily accepted “black” in place of “negro” because it’s shorter (one syllable vs two), but nobody uses “African American” (seven syllables) except in bureaucratese. This is a good thing since it tends to insulate English from politicized terminology, which is usually long, clunky, and unwieldy. If the same pattern holds in French, it will be hard for divulgâcher (four syllables) to replace spoiler (two), unless the latter has not yet had time to become widely used.
Despite the difficulties dictionary writers face in keeping up with a living language, there’s a great deal of value in it. These days it’s a common attitude that only usage really matters and that standards of correctness should just be abandoned as an irrelevant concern of nit-pickers, but in reality this would create serious practical problems. Modern societies, with their routine use of complex and exact concepts, require standardization of language. If any usage of any word to mean anything anybody wants were accepted as equally valid, meaning would rapidly grow fuzzy and uncertain, which would be a problem for things like laws and their interpretation. Errors of usage can also be useful for detecting more serious problems. If I’m reading an article and the author speaks of “diffusing” a bomb or being “unphased” by a problem or “reigning in” activities he wishes to curtail, that alerts me to be wary of any factual claims he makes — because a person who is careless about word usage is likely to be careless about other things, like fact-checking.
Thanks for an entertaining post on a complex subject.