Diccionario de la Real Academia Española

The Diccionario de la lengua española, also known as the Diccionario de la Real Academia Española (DRAE), is the authoritative dictionary of the Spanish language. It is produced, edited, and published by the Real Academia Española (RAE – Royal Spanish Academy). It was first published in 1780, since when new editions have been published about once a decade. The twenty-third edition was published in 2014.

When the RAE was founded in 1713, one of its primary objectives was compiling a Castilian Spanish dictionary. Its first endeavor was the six-volume Diccionario de Autoridades (Dictionary of Authorities) from 1726 to 1739. Based on that work, an abridged version was published in 1780, the full title of which was the Diccionario de la lengua castellana compuesto por la Real Academia Española, reducido á un tomo para su más fácil uso (Dictionary of the Castilian language composed by the Royal Spanish Academy, reduced to one volume for easier use). According to its prologue, the dictionary was published for general public access to a dictionary during the long time between the publishing of the first and second editions of the exhaustive Authorities Dictionary, thus offering a cheaper reference book; by the time the second edition was published, it had become the principal dictionary, superseding its ancestor; the last edition of the Diccionario de Autoridades was published in 1793.

The fourth edition (1803) introduced and incorporated the digraphs ch (che) and ll (elle) to the Castilian alphabet as separate, discrete letters in alphabetic organization. That incorporation was overturned in 1994 (at the tenth meeting of the Asociación de Academias de la Lengua Española) where they were re-ordered in concordance with the Latin alphabet. Also in 1803, the letter "X" was replaced with "J" when its pronunciation was identical to that of the guttural "J", and the circumflex accent (^) was eliminated.

The earliest editions were more extensive: they included Latin translations of the entry, in some cases gave usage examples (especially in popular phrases), and summarized the word's etymology; contemporary editions do so concisely. The earliest editions had "X" entries that no longer appear individually.

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