05: Real Academia Española, http://www.rae.es

It is the Real Academia Española site that offers two basic services: its Dictionaries and Its Data Bases: one diachronic, CORDE, that registers what pretends to be a Spanish Language model along its history and another synchronic, CREA, that registers the literary works of the last years in order to adapt the language to the human use.

CREA, which stand for Corpus de Referencia del Español has 100 million words taken from written and oral texts produced in all the Spanish speaking countries from year 1975 until now. The databases search is in its experimental stage.

They provide two major dictionaries, the full version DRAE which stands for Diccionario de la Real Academia Española and the DHLE which stands for Diccionario Histórica de la Lengua Española.

Along its life they issued 21 editions being the last one in 1992 with more than 83.000 articles.  The next one will appear in year 2001 making use of customized informatics tools and with information extracted from its databases.

Brief History: its origins goes as far as to the year 1713 with the issue of an “ample and precise” dictionary. From that it sprung out to the paramount work titled Diccionario de la Lengua castellana, Dictionary of the Castilian Language  edited from 1726 through 1739 in six volumes and known as Diccionario de Autoridades, Authorities Dictionary. Over the years, they edited the Dictionary reduced to one big volume as was know from that time all over the world along its 21 editions being a classical lexicographic brand up to now.

Its evolution is ruled by the Asociación de Academias de la Lengua Española, Latin American Associations for the Spanish Language, which coordinates the inclusion of new voices and acceptations mainly originated within the Latin American Region

The standard and cultivated Spanish still constitutes the dominant flow but the scientifically and technical subjects are wining space at a high pace and even the less valuated forms of the everyday language as long as the 22 nations body or “corpus” of the “Authority” be tinted of Latin American influence.

The searching process: it is not easy to find: http://www.rae.es/nivel1/buscon/AUTORIDAD2.HTM . They provide you a page as if it were slowly scanned taken directly from the book source. As they offer the possibility of download the actual version (1992) with the first edition version (1726-1739) you may appreciate the language evolution. For instance try with the word “meneo”, which means something like shacking your body, in both versions and you will ponder the relative importance transformation of that word along the time.