Noël François de Wailly
French grammarian and lexicographer
Noël François de Wailly (31 July 1724 – 7 April 1801) was a French grammarian and lexicographer.
Life
He was born at Amiens. He was a student of Joseph Valart and Philippe de Prétot.
Noël François de Wailly spent his life in Paris, where for many years he carried on a school which was extensively patronized by foreigners who wished to learn French. In 1754 he published Principes généraux de la langue française, which revolutionized the teaching of grammar in France. The book was adopted as a textbook by the University of Paris and generally used throughout France, an abstract of it being prepared for primary educational purposes.
In 1771, de Wailly published Moyens simples et raisonnés de diminuer les imperfections de notre orthographe, in which he advocated phonetic spelling. He was a member of the Institute from its foundation (1795), and took an active part in the preparation of the Dictionnaire de l'Académie.
His works, in addition to those cited, include L'Orthographe des dames (1782) and Le Nouveau Vocabulaire français, ou abrégé du dictionnaire de l'Académie (1801).
He was the brother of architect Charles De Wailly and the grandfather of archivist and librarian Natalis de Wailly.
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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 Feb 28, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q4156196. VIAF identifies the subject as 46791857. The Library of Congress control number is n92115386. 3 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1724, 1801, 1754 and 1771.
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This entry incorporates text from “Noël François de Wailly” 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.