Last updated on 12 February 2025
Good news. You will be able to slip the entire 2017 Petit Larousse illustrated into your pocket This means that you can use it at any time wherever you are. Thanks to Larousse who had the good idea to propose the content of his famous dictionary in the form of an application for iPhone.
A real good idea, especially since the declination is rather successful. The application that can be accessed without an internet connection offers good ergonomics and a good user experience. You will find the purely utilitarian aspect of a good dictionary, but also the pleasure of being able to dive into it without any real precise purpose, as was done in the past by browsing the illustrated pages of dictionaries.
This edition of Petit Larousse Illustré offers a complete dictionary on the language with more than 63,000 words, more than 120,000 senses and 20,000 locutions. When we say complete it is complete, the application also contains 2,000 regionalisms and words from the Francophonie.
For the encyclopedic part, the Petit Larousse displays 28,000 proper names of personalities, places or events. 4,500 encyclopedic supplements, 2000 photos, drawings and maps.
So much for the useful part of the dictionary. Pleasure side you will find the famous pink pages with proverbs, foreign locutions, historical words and a small treasure trove of francophone locutions. Sympa also, an aid to the games of letters such as crosswords to search for a word according to the position of one or more letters or a game to have fun finding the right definition of a word.
The app once installed on your iPhone works very well. The search engine is fast and accurate. The definitions are perfectly legible. The illustrations are of high quality and give an impeccable rendering on the screen of your smartphone. Note that you can favorite words and save them to iCloud if you want. You can also share a definition by email.
A nice app to always have a good dico at hand. The pleasure of paper less, the ultra-practical side more.
The Petit Larousse Illustré 2017 is currently only available on iPhone, and an Android version is being developed. The release date has not yet been announced by the people at Larousse. You can buy the 2017 Petit Larousse illustrated on Apple’s store for EUR 12.99.
English
Another app reserved for the iPhone while the majority of smartphone users are on Android 🙁
This description lacks at least two important pieces of information:
– the price?
– the search method(s) for words. One of Larousse’s competitors, the TLF (Trésor de la Langue Française, produced by the CNRS, free online) offers 3 modes: 1) the word is typed on the keyboard, the system corrects the main spelling errors. 2) search for the word in a drop-down list, in alphabetical order. 3) the pronunciation of the word is typed on a simplified phonetic keyboard. The Littré (free online, free app for ordis, tablets and smartphones) offers voice search: just pronounce the word …