F.A.Q.

• Q: I found an error in one of your resources. What should I do?
  
  A: Feel free to submit the error via our contact form. However, please understand that these resources are not actively supported and we may never get around to some revisions. The Webster's Dictionary and Roget's Thesaurus are from the early part of the 20th century, and will not contain some modern words. The French dictionary and conjugator are not intended to be complete and do have some problems, although we sincerely hope they will be useful to you.
• Q: How can I enter accented characters?
  
  A: First of all, we highly reccommend using a modern browser such as Firefox which supports Unicode and learning how enter accented chracters on your keyboard. Here's some information.
  
  If you are unable to use your operating system's built-in methods for entering accented characters, you may use capital letters to match any accent in the French-English dictionary only, so "E" matches "e", "é", "è", "ë" and "ê". You may also use the following notation in French input fields in the French-English dictionary and the conjugator:

  \ for grave		a\ becomes à
  / for aigu		e/ becomes é
  ^ for circonflexe		e^ becomes ê
  , for cedille		c, becomes ç
  " for trema		o" becomes ö

• Q: What is the ARTFL project?
  
  A: In 1957 the French government initiated the creation of a new dictionary of the French language, the Trésor de la Langue Française. This resource was of great interest to scholars all around the world and an effective method of providing access to the materials was needed. Out of this need was born the American and French Research on the Treasury of the French Language (ARTFL) Project, established in 1981 by the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique and the University of Chicago.
  
  Since that time, our scope has expanded to include hundreds of databases, dictionaries and other resources containing many thousands of texts in dozens of languages, with a multitude of collaborations on both sides of the Atlantic. Please visist our home page or our what's new page to learn more about our work.
• Q: Can I still use the old versions of these resources?
  
  A: Yes. Have a look at our Classic page. All your old friends are there.
• Q: What are regular expressions and how can I use them to refine my search?
  
  A: Regular expressions provide tools for constructing queries based on wild cards and other non-exact matches. The most common and useful regular expression is .* -- this will match any number of any character. For example, bl.*k will match "block", "bleak", "blank", "blink", or "blue cheese snack".
  
  The vast universe of regular expressions can but be hinted at here. A good tutorial lies here. I strongly encourage you to learn and use regular expressions if you routinely search and replace in text.
  
  Advanced users: Note that the regexp searching is done at the MySQL level here, so if you are crafting very complex patterns, make sure to take into account the quirks of that implementation. By default, most queries are transformed by prepending "^" and appending "$", so that your query must match exactly the whole word, since "^" matches the beginning and "$" the end of the string. Therefore if you search for d[oi]g, your search is actually run as ^d[oi]g$, and would match "dog" or "dig" but not "dogged" or "gravedigger". Run it as .*d[io]g.* if you want to run the less constrained search.
  
  Important note: The MySQL regexp implementation is not currently multi-byte safe. This means that "." WILL NOT match an accented character. Use ".." to match an accented character (or two non-accented characters). honey@artfl.uchicago.edu