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Dictionaries

Even if you are already familiar with French in a modern sense, in reading historical documents you will find a lot of archaic language and unfamiliar vocabulary. In addition to that, meanings of words can shift over time to be entirely different than their historic meanings. To this purpose, attached are a few dictionaries that you will find useful in finding historic or modern meanings of the vocabulary you encounter.

A good, more modern French-English dictionary, Linguee, can be found available here: https://www.linguee.com/english-french

One of the first French-English dictionaries, Congrave's A dictionarie of the French and English tongues, was published in 1611 and can be found on Internet Archive here: https://archive.org/details/cotgrave1611goog/page/n698/mode/2up, with a searchable version available here: http://www.pbm.com/~lindahl/cotgrave/search/search.cgi

For searchable historical dictionaries of the French language, you can try the dictionnaires d'autrefois (in French), which can be found here: https://artflsrv04.uchicago.edu/philologic5/publicdicos/bibliography?head=Parfois

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