Abstract: The World of Blockchain: a Study of an Emerging Terminology with Nebulous Contours from a Secondary Corpus. Defined in 2008 as a large database with the unique feature of being shared simultaneously by all its users, the blockchain interests various actors as it presents itself as a technology with revolutionary potential. The terms of this new field of knowledge are increasingly penetrating the world’s institutional, economic and financial discourses, although this is not always matched by a real awareness of the concepts included in the world of blockchain, which nevertheless remains very nebulous. In this contribution we have analysed the emerging terms used in French in the constitution of the specialised lexicon of this field of knowledge from the point of view of language planning actions relating to these terms. To do so, we took into consideration lexicographic and terminographic resources available online and constituting a secondary corpus of study, which enabled us to show that the emerging terminology of blockchain lends well itself to studies in terminological neology. In fact, this terminology cannot be considered completely stable either at the formal level or at the semantic level. As for the terminological resources consulted, although they are very useful for understanding blockchain concepts and for linguistic orientation, our study reveals that there is no unanimity with regard to some of the linguistic equivalents proposed in French for these English terminological units. This leads us to consider the need for in-depth analyses of the French terminology of blockchain based on a primary study corpus.

Keywords: blockchain, terminology, terminography, lexicology, terminological neology