Abel Boyer (1667? – 16 November 1729) was a French-English lexicographer, journalist and miscellaneous writer. Biography Abel Boyer was probably born on 24 June 1667 at Castres, in Upper Languedoc, southern France. His father, Pierre Boyer, one of the two consuls or chief magistrates of Castres, had been suspended and fined for his Protestantism. Boyer's education at the academy of Puylaurens was interrupted by the religious disturbances, and leaving France with his maternal uncle Pierre Campdomerc, a noted Huguenot preacher, he finished his studies at Franeker in Friesland, after a brief episode, it is said, of military service in Holland. Proceeding to England in 1689 he fell into great poverty, and is represented as transcribing and preparing for the press Dr. Thomas Smith's edition of William Camden's Latin correspondence (London, 1691). A good classical scholar, Boyer became in 1692 tutor to Allen Bathurst, afterwards first Earl Bathurst, whose father Sir Benjamin was treasurer of the household of the princess, afterwards Queen Anne. Probably through this connection he was appointed French teacher to her son Prince William, Duke of Gloucester, for whose use he prepared and to whom he dedicated The Complete French Master, published in 1694. Disappointed of advancement on account of his zeal for Whig principles, he abandoned tuition for authorship. In December 1699, Boyer produced on the London stage, with indifferent success, a modified translation in blank verse of Jean Racine's Iphigénie, which was published in 1700 as Achilles or Iphigenia in Aulis, a tragedy written by Mr. Boyer. A second edition of it appeared in 1714 as The Victim, or Achilles and Iphigenia in Aulis, in an "advertisement" prefixed to which Boyer stated that in its first form it had "passed the correction and approbation" of John Dryden. In 1699 also the work for which Boyer is best known was published, The Royal Dictionary, "In two parts. First, French and English. Secondly, English and French", ostensibly composed for the use of the Duke of Gloucester, then dead. In 1700 Boyer produced an abridged version, and in 1702 a version titled in French was published in The Hague. It was much superior to every previous work of the kind, and has been the basis of very many subsequent French-English dictionaries; the last English unabridged edition is that of 1816; the edition published at Paris in 1860 is stated to be the 41st. For the English-French section Boyer claimed