What was the Diccionario de autoridades of the Real Academia Española?
The Diccionario de autoridades
El Diccionario de autoridades
1726–1739. The Academy's first great work was a dictionary 'as copious as could be made'.
Where: Spain, Madrid
What happened
The Academy's first great work was a dictionary 'as copious as could be made'. Its six volumes appeared between 1726 and 1739 under the title Diccionario de la lengua castellana, but everyone calls it the Diccionario de autoridades because, after each definition, it quotes the 'authorities': passages from Cervantes, Quevedo, Fray Luis and other writers showing the word in use. To write it the academicians first built a file of quotations, and because they had to choose between many ways of spelling the same word, the preliminaries of 1726 contain the first academic spelling rules, developed into the Orthographía of 1741. In 1780 the Academy published a one-volume dictionary without the quotations, the ancestor of today's Diccionario de la lengua española, which has reached its 23rd edition.
Say it
El primer diccionario de la Academia tiene seis tomos y muchas citas de escritores.
The Academy's first dictionary has six volumes and many quotations from writers.
Why it matters
It fixed the vocabulary of educated Spanish with evidence from real texts, a method the Academy's historical dictionary still follows, and it forced the first decisions on how Spanish should be spelled.
Connected
- Don Quixote is published (January 1605)
- The Real Academia Española is founded (3 August 1713)
- The Real Academia Española is founded (3 August 1713)
- The ñ and the shaping of Spanish spelling (1741–2010)
- The ñ and the shaping of Spanish spelling (1741–2010)
Sources
- Real Academia Española: Historia — ASALE
- La Real Academia Española: trescientos años (Anuario 2013) — Centro Virtual Cervantes
- Diccionarios (obras académicas) — ASALE
- Ortografía (obras académicas) — ASALE
- La nueva ortografía académica (Revista Cálamo FASPE 57, 2011) — Dialnet / FASPE