Les dictionnaires de difficultés et les difficultés orthographiques

Apart from language dictionaries and general encyclopaedias, French lexicographical production includes a fair proportion of reference books specifically devoted to the difficulties of French, or dictionnaires de difficultés. Do these works have a genuine specificity as is claimed in the front matter ? How do they treat difficulties in spelling ? Is it dealt with coherently, and from one dictionary to another, is the treatment homogenous ? And if not, why not ? In the first part of the article, there is an analysis of what indeed goes to make up a language difficulty, in particular as far as spelling goes. The idea of difficulty is inherent in the formalisation of the code in any language. The second part is devoted to the relationship between the language difficulty and the dictionary of language difficulties, in particular the construction of the (spelling) difficulty of the language as a methodological prerequisite of these dictionaries. In the third part, a description is made of the attitude which the dictionaries making up the corpus display in regard to spelling difficulties.