Antoine Furetière

Born in Paris in 1619, Antoine Furetière became a writer, scholar, and churchman, and was elected to the Académie Française in 1662. He is remembered both for his sharp eye for manners and society and for his interest in the living language of his time.

His best-known literary work is Le Roman bourgeois (1666), a witty, realistic novel that gently mocks Parisian life and literary fashions. Furetière also devoted years to compiling his Dictionnaire universel, a major reference work that aimed to include not just elegant literary French but also terms from trades, arts, and everyday use.

That dictionary project led to a famous dispute with the Académie Française, which eventually expelled him in the 1680s. Furetière died in 1688, but his dictionary was published soon after and became one of the works for which he is most widely remembered.