Diccionario de la lengua española

The Diccionario de la lengua española (DLE; English: Dictionary of the Spanish Language) is the authoritative dictionary of the Spanish language. It is produced, edited, and published by the Royal Spanish Academy, with the participation of the Association of Academies of the Spanish Language. It was first published in 1780, as the Diccionario de la lengua castellana and subsequent editions have been published about once a decade. The twenty-third edition was published in 2014; it is available online, incorporating modifications to be included in the twenty-fourth print edition.

The dictionary was created to maintain the linguistic purity of the Spanish language; unlike many English-language dictionaries, it is intended to be authoritative and prescriptive, rather than descriptive.

Origin and development

Purpose

When the Royal Spanish Academy was founded in 1713, one of its primary objectives was to compile an authoritative Spanish dictionary. Its first statutes said in 1715 that its purpose was to:

cultivate and stabilise the purity and elegance of the Castilian language, removing all the errors in words, modes of speech, and syntax that have been introduced by ignorance, vain affectation, carelessness, and the excessive freedom to innovate. It will be used to distinguish foreign words, phrases and constructions from our own, the outdated from the current, the low and rustic from the courtly and elevated, burlesque from seriousness, and, finally, the accurate from the inaccurate. The Academy's original motto of limpia, fija y da esplendor (It cleans, stabilises, and gives splendour [to the language]) was in more recent times modified to unifica, limpia y fija (it unifies, cleans, and stabilises). In 1995 it was still expected to "establish and spread the criteria of propriety and correctness".