This project, which began in 1981, grew out of the French government's desire to create a new dictionary in 1957. The realization that such a corpus of texts could be useful to other humanists and social scientists involved in French studies is what inspired the collaboration between the CNRS and the University of Chicago.
Users are able to perform a variety of searches on the texts selected for analysis.
A search can be done for a single word, a word root, prefixes, suffixes or a list of words provided by the user. One can also search a genre, texts written during a certain period, or all texts written by one or more authors. The possibilities are endless and are almost custom made to accommodate the user's research needs. In terms of reference material, there is also a French-English Dictionary and a Verb Conjugator. This project is now expanding to include a greater number of Medieval and Renaissance texts as well as a greater variety, including novels, verse, theater, journalism, essays, correspondence, and treaties.