Buffon

American  

[by-fawn] / büˈfɔ̃ /

noun

1. Georges Louis Leclerc Comte de, 1707–88, French naturalist.

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Buffon British  

/ byfɔ̃ /

noun

1. Georges Louis Leclerc (ʒɔrʒ lwi ləklɛr), Comte de . 1707–88, French encyclopedist of natural history; principal author of Histoire naturelle (36 vols., 1749–89), containing the Époques de la nature (1777), which foreshadowed later theories of evolution

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Buffon Scientific  

/ bo̅o̅-fôn′ /

1. French naturalist who spent his life compiling the Histoire naturelle, in which he attempted to discuss all of the facts about the natural world known at that time. It eventually reached 44 volumes and laid the foundation for later studies in biology, zoology, and anatomy.

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Example Sentences

Zinedine Zidane scored one for France in the 2006 World Cup final, beating Italy keeper Gianluigi Buffon with an effort that went in off the crossbar.

From BBC

Ms. Stalnaker argues that these books, the last in the 36-volume “Natural History,” are too often overlooked: “It was here that Buffon offered his final reflections on his life and practice as a naturalist, and it was here that his lifetime of thinking about death crystallized around the motif of the fossil.”

From The Wall Street Journal

Following Buffon, Diderot posited three levels of life: the life of the entire animal, the life of each of its organs and the life of the molecule.

From The Wall Street Journal

Joanna Stalnaker, a professor of French at Columbia University, adopts this line as the title of her fascinating book about 18th-century philosophers facing death, examining how Enlightenment thinkers—David Hume, the Comte de Buffon, Denis Diderot, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Voltaire and more—wrote philosophically as they approached their deathbeds.

From The Wall Street Journal

Buffon believed that through the natural aging process we are all slowly turning into fossils: “The skin dries out, wrinkles form little by little, the hair turns white, the teeth fall out, the face loses its shape, the body becomes stooped.”

From The Wall Street Journal