Catholicon (trilingual dictionary)
15th-century Breton-French-Latin dictionary
The Catholicon (from Greek Καθολικόν 'universal') is a 15th-century dictionary written in Breton, French, and Latin. It is the first Breton dictionary and also the first French dictionary. It contains six thousand entries and was compiled in 1464 by Jehan Lagadeuc, a man from Plougonven who was probably a priest. It was first printed in 1499 in Tréguier; its early date classifies it as an incunable.
The work takes its name from an earlier dictionary, the Latin Catholicon of John of Genoa. The Breton/French/Latin Catholicon is referred to by some historians as the Catholicon Armoricum (in reference to Armorica, a name for the region of Brittany in Latin) in order to distinguish it from other documents with similar names.
Language
The dictionary is arranged alphabetically with Breton entries, followed by translations in French and Latin. Each entry contains additional commentary in Latin, and most editions use Latin for their introductions and any clarifying notes.
Spelling at this time was not standardized in French or in Breton, and different forms of the same word can be found in the text, sometimes even within the same article. French was undergoing changes in pronunciation in the 15th century as Middle French emerged.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 5, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q277856. None of the 2 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1464 and 1499.
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This entry incorporates text from “Catholicon (trilingual dictionary)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.