La marque « néol. » dans le dictionnaire : retour sur un dictionnaire de synonymes et d'analogies de la fin du xx^e siècle

When R. Boissinot’s Dictionnaire de synonymes, d’analogies et d’antonymes, first published in 1973, came to be re-edited, the status of words originally marked “néol” had to be re-examined. there were 1 9 in all, 35 also qualified as loans, and 15 others with some other remark (register, subject field, and in one instance, grammatical category). it turned out that loans and other such categories were not classified systematically, and that many words that had no remark attached could also have been annotated in this way. moreover, several words were qualified as “néol”, whereas they had already been in use for some time and were quite widely known. by marking “néol”, the lexicographer seems in fact to be warning the reader that a particular word might be rejected by purists. the remark however does allow us to evaluate the lexicographer’s neological sense, since he notes as such words which had come into the language since the second world war, or those which may be older but only widely adopted later. studying words which are commented on in this way and the actual comments made both in the preface and in the body of the dictionary provides a valid topic for metalexicography. this is the case of such remarks that are made in littré (1878) about the change in gender of cyclone, and, more recently, of the way TGV (“very fast train”) in contrast with train bleu, are commented on in contemporary dictionaries. It is up to the linguist to reflect on how new a word is, how long it may be used and sometimes how it begins to disappear.