New French Language database

The ARTFL database consists of over 2600 texts, ranging from classic works of French literature to various kinds of non-fiction prose and technical writing. The eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries are about equally represented, with a smaller selection of seventeenth century texts as well as some medieval and Renaissance texts. There is also an Italian component – Opera del Vocabolario Italiano (OVI) – containing 1780 vernacular texts dated prior to 1375, including Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, as well as many lesser-known texts.

Reference sources include Diderot and d'Alembert's Encyclopedie, Dictionnaires d'autrefois, which combines Nicot's Thresor de la langue française (1606), Féraud's Dictionaire critique de la langue française (1787-1788), Littré's Dictionnaire de la langue française (1872-1877), and the Dictionnaire de L'Académie française 1st (1694), 4th (1762), 5th (1798), 6th (1835), and 8th (1932-5) editions. Also available are Pierre Bayle's Dictionnaire historique et critique (5th edition, 1740), and the Trésor de la Langue Française dictionary (TLFi).

The Project for American and French Research on the Treasury of the French Language (ARTFL) is a cooperative enterprise of the Laboratoire ATILF (Analyse et Traitement Informatique de la Langue Française) of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), the Division of the Humanities, the Division of the Social Sciences, and Electronic Text Services (ETS) of the University of Chicago.

More material is added regularly and is noted on the ARTFL “What’s New” page.