THE DICCIONARIO DE LA LENGUA CASTELLANA (1817-1832) AND THE DICCIONARIO MANUAL PROJECT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

Abstract

In the first decades of the nineteenth century the Real Academia Española set out to produce a manual dictionary which would be a substantially dif- ferent work from the Diccionario de la lengua castellana, which had been published from time to time in successive editions since its first appearance in 1780 in a single volume and without citing authorities. The aim of this article is to reconstruct the origins of the Diccionario manual in the first half of the nineteenth century and its relation to the Diccionario de la lengua castellana by examining the historical docu- mentation and studying various editions of the dictionary itself (DRAE 1817-DRAE1832). The article seeks to demonstrate that some of the changes included in these latter editions cannot be explained without reference to the Diccionario manual project.