A Place of Words examines the fifth and most controversial edition of the dictionary of the Académie Française, published in 1798 and spanning several regimes before the publication of the sixth in 1835. Full of anachronisms and appearing to slight the French Revolution, from the outset the edition received much judgement and critique. Under the Consulate, the government used it as an instrument to assert control over the language. As the first book-length study of this controversial fifth edition, A Place of Words offers insights into the Revolution and Napoleonic periods neglected in previous scholarship.

This is the first unified history of the large, prestigious dictionaries of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, compiled in academies, which set out to glorify living European languages. The tradition began with the Vocabolario degli Accademici della Crusca (1612) in Florence and the Dictionnaire de l'Académie françoise (1694) in Paris, and spread across Europe - to Germany, Spain, England, Denmark, Sweden, the Netherlands, Portugal, and Russia - in the eighteenth century, engaging students of language as diverse as Leibniz, Samuel Johnson, and Catherine the Great. All the major academy and academy-style dictionaries of the period up to 1800, published and unpublished, are discussed in a single narrative, bridging national and linguistic boundaries, to offer a history of lexicography on a European scale. Like John Considine's Dictionaries in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge University Press, 2008), this study treats dictionaries both as physical books and as ambitious works of the human imagination.

Nationalism is a movement and a state of mind that brings together national identity, consciousness, and collectivities. A five-country study that spans five hundred years, this historically oriented work in sociology bids well to replace all previous works on the subject.

Presents a sample database (1694-1935) that contains a sampling of articles taken from the complete editions of the "Dictionnaire de l'Academie francaise." Explains that the database contains four indexes: a headword index, a metalinguistic keyword index, a comparative index of text-words, and an index of hidden occurrences. The database is part of the international Dictionnaire de l'Academie Database Project. and is provided online by Russon Wooldridge