Polythéisme et lexicographie : principes d’un dictionnaire des noms de divinités

– This article presents a Dictionary of Names of Deities available online— which already includes over 5.400 entries covering most mythologies and religions—and exposes the principles underlying its constitution. It emphasizes the difficulties concerning the identification of gods and goddesses (must all be taken into account assimilations, superpositions or interferences between deities, not to mention the contradictions between sources) as well as the spellings (there are many attested variants). From a structural point of view, the dictionary comes in the form of a table including, for each name, the following columns: variants and cross-references, gender, geographical, historical and/or ethnic field and subfield, nature and functions (with synthetic descriptions). Special attention has been given to nouns with epithets, a characteristic of classical mythology. Even if the first source of information was a set of specialized books (most of them French), the Internet has been widely used, after carefully selecting and checking the data. Beyond the names of deities, this publication aims at promoting precision and clarity when processing a complex lexical field. Two appendices complete the article: some extracts from the dictionary illustrating its structure, and a “semantactic” study of the names of deities, considered as a coherent class of objects.