La definición sinonímica en la sexta edición del Diccionario de la lengua castellana de la Real Academia Española

Abstract

The sixth edition of the Diccionario de la lengua castellana was urgently published in 1822 by the Real Academia Espanola, due to the lack of copies of the previous edition that had only been published five years before, in 1817. The same criteria that had been applied in the elaboration of precedent edition were followed, thus demonstrating continuity between both editions. However, in practice there are differences that point at an improvement in the accuracy of the lexicographic technique. One of these differences concerns the coherence between the synonymic definitions and the cross-reference. For this reason, this paper aims to evaluate their relation in the academic dictionary, as well as to analyse the modifications that the synonymic definitions experience in the 1822 edition. This study has led to confirm that in the sixth edition of the dictionary the Academia distinguished between synonymic definitions comprising various equivalents and those that were composed of one equivalent, making use in this case of the cross-reference, a lexicographic resource that concentrated the definition in a single entry (the most common one). By doing so, duplicated definitions were suppressed.