Indo-European Etymological Dictionary and IE etymological databases categorized under your Language resources don't seem to work anymore. :(

From D’Israeli’s Curiosities of Literature: ‘That the French Academy were generally frivolously employed appears also from an epistle to Balzac, by Boisrobert, the amusing companion of Cardinal Richelieu. “Every one separately,” says he, “promises great things; when they meet they do nothing. They have been six years employed on the letter F; and I should be happy if I were certain of living till they got through G.”’ Plus ça change…

junk555: Tsk. I should weed out that list; I haven't checked some of them in years. Thanks for the heads-up.

So the Académiciens solemnly continue with their august activities.

Meanwhile, outside on the streets of Paris, Clermont-Ferrand, Chicoutimi, Abidjan, Dinant and Montreux, real French speakers go about their daily lives speaking real French...

So, if one takes into account their biases, is the Académie's dictionary any good?

Andrew: As I understand it, it is as irrelevant as it is definitive, and it is definitively definitive.

The French Academy gives langwidge academies a bad name, which is not necessarily something they especially deserve. (And I for one have surfeited on the Englishists's incessant celebration of their own rooting-tooting free-wheelingness. Why in the name of Holy Fuck, if it be so, is that Safire geezer - to say nothing, which is plenty, of lesser spotted nincompoops like Lynn Truss - subjected other than to total neglect and/or universal derision? Eh?)

I guess the big difference is that Safire or Truss don't actually get a government office or paycheck in exchange for doing their ridiculous thing. (As far as I know...)

Also, no uniform.

Seventy years is not a record for sluggish lexicography. The Thesaurus Linguae Latinae, which is not only a dictionary of classical Latin, but written in Latin, mostly by Germans, published its first volume in 1900 (give or take a year) and is still bogged down in N, though I think they've jumped ahead and done bits of O or P. (All the negatives in N make for trouble.) What they've published so far fills about two feet of shelf space, and they've still got at least 40 years to go at their current rate. The TLL is very handy for detailed word study, but it seems like every word I need to know that much about begins with S or V.