Resumen de Cryptic avatars: the ornamental illustrations of rare initial letters in French dictionaries
This paper examines the ornamental illustration of rare initial-letters in some 19th and 20th century French dictionaries and attempts to show how these illustrations offer a few predictable - and somewhat exotic - items on the one hand, and on the other reveal a great many diversionary tactics meant to dissimulate the difficulty ofillustrating words that start with these letters. These tactics include 1) grouping of rare letters into a single head-piece; 2) graphic stratagems such as drawing "big" or adding irrelevant items; 3) breaching a thematic programme of illustrations for lack ofitems whose name starts with the necessary letter; 4) stratagems more related to the lexicon itself, such as addition of labels, illustrations based on variant or even fanciful spellings.
