Can dictionaries survive the age of internet search?

France’s new dictionary is struggling to stay current at a time when language is rapidly evolving and the online world is at our fingertips

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‘Compiling a dictionary is a long trek: at every step, a pitfall, a furrow or a rock.” Thus Maurice Druon, the Perpetual Secretary of the Académie française, on producing the ninth edition of the academy’s dictionary of the French language. Work began in 1986, and its completion was marked in a ceremony last week, at which the French president, Emmanuel Macron, was presented with a copy of the tome. 
Presiding over a similar ceremony in 1928 to mark the completion of the Oxford English Dictionary, Stanley Baldwin, then prime minister, joked, “I have not read it.” No such levity attended last week’s presentation. But the Immortals of the academy had scarcely completed their labours before the criticism began. 
The academy’s website claims that the addition of some 21,000 words to the latest edition reflects the changing language: “yuzu”, “tofu”, “vitro-masseur” and “wokisme” are in; “smartphone” and “feminicide” are not. 
But in a sulphurous exchange on the France Inter radio station, the academician Antoine Compagnon defended the dictionary against a Sorbonne academic, Julie Neveux, of the group Les Linguistes atterrées, who wondered how a dictionary that took 30 years to compile could claim current relevance. “I’m not here to respond to the objections of minor specialists,” huffed Compagnon.
There, in a nutshell, is the problem. It’s not the built-in obsolescence – Jorge Luis Borges observed that dictionaries are by definition, “artificial repositories, put together well after the languages they define”. But when it comes to clarifying language for “l’honnête homme du XXIe siècle” (Montaigne’s term is magnificently problematic in this context), the academy is fatally constrained by its own grandeur. 
The OED was produced in a chilly north Oxford garden shed, using contributions from the public. In The Dictionary People, her entertaining book on the making of the OED, Sarah Ogilvie notes that the volunteer lexicographers included numerous formidable women, several (male) murderers and an inmate of Broadmoor. 
By contrast the Immortals, in their hand-embroidered frock-coats and swords, are the epitome of elitism. Mostly elderly, white and male, their mission to maintain the historical continuity that has guided their work on the dictionary since the first edition of 1694 places them increasingly at odds with the public.
Perhaps the loud rumblings of discontent with the new dictionary are symptoms of a wider feeling that dictionaries in general are becoming obsolete. Their project of fixing and defining language seems absurd in an era when popular vocabulary (“brat”, “delulu”) has the lifespan of a mayfly; and the rule of Lewis Carroll’s Humpty Dumpty (“When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean”) increasingly applies in public life.
Yet to some of us, dictionaries represent a connection with language that online resources can’t quite replicate. Appearing on Desert Island Discs in 1978, Charles Aznavour chose to be cast away with a French dictionary – not, presumably, because he expected to have to look up an unknown word, but because of the imaginative riches contained in those austere alphabetical wordlists.
It is even possible that the differences between the academy and its critics, the linguistes atterrées, are not insuperable: each of their websites, for example, has a section where the public can ask questions about usage. If only the two opposing factions could find a common language.
The OED traces the origins of the term “dog’s dinner” to E F Benson’s 1902 novel Scarlet and Hyssop: “Scraps only,” says Lady Alston. “It always reminds me of a dog’s dinner.” But these days the distinction between a dog’s dinner and the human version has become increasingly blurred.
Since the pandemic, when pet dogs in the UK increased from nine million to 13 million, there has been a growing trend for “dog-friendly” policies at high-end restaurants. Which is lovely for besotted dog-owners who imagine that everyone will be as charmed by their pet as they are, less so for diners who hadn’t planned on consuming their tasting menu in the company of a pack of canines.
There is an infallible rule that the less you like dogs, the more certain they are to come and rest their slavering head lovingly upon your knee. So when it comes to booking a Michelin-starred night out, cave canem.
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