Wordsmith: How I Made My Dictionary

By: Emile Littre

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Synopsis: Writer, physician, philosopher and lexicographer, Émile Littré was commissioned by Hachette in 1841 to compile a new dictionary of the French language. The work, finally started in 1845, took nearly 30 years to complete, during which period France went through a great deal of turbulence. Littré wrote this companion volume, a remarkable novella-length essay, Comment j’ai fait mon dictionnaire (‘How I Made My Dictionary’), in 1880, which was translated and published for the first time in English in 1998 by a former Indian diplomat. The translation, now brought back into print by Hachette India, has been commended by Dictionaries, a journal of the Dictionary Society of North America, for being ‘accurate and conveying the original’s lively, intense effect.’ This book is a vital philological addition to the study of words and language, and an insight into the remarkable men who made such study possible by embarking on epic ventures of the literary kind.