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The Diccionario de la lengua española [a] (DLE; [b] English: Dictionary of the Spanish language) is the authoritative dictionary of the Spanish language. [1] It is produced, edited, and published by the Royal Spanish Academy, with the participation of the Association of Academies of the Spanish Language.
Because Spanish is a Romance language (which means it evolved from Latin), many of its words are either inherited from Latin or derive from Latin words. Although English is a Germanic language , it, too, incorporates thousands of Latinate words that are related to words in Spanish. [ 3 ]
Historically, don was used to address members of the nobility, e.g. hidalgos, as well as members of the secular clergy.The treatment gradually came to be reserved for persons of the blood royal, e.g. Don John of Austria, and those of such acknowledged high or ancient aristocratic birth as to be noble de Juro e Herdade, that is, "by right and heredity" rather than by the king's grace.
Root of the word aboriginal. ab ovo: from the egg: i.e., from the beginning or origin. Derived from the longer phrase in Horace's Satire 1.3: "ab ovo usque ad mala", meaning "from the egg to the apples", referring to how Ancient Roman meals would typically begin with an egg dish and end with fruit (cf. the English phrase soup to nuts).
The Spanish language has two names: español (English: Spanish) and castellano (English: Castilian). Spanish speakers from different countries or backgrounds can show a preference for one term or the other, or use them indiscriminately, but political issues or common usage might lead speakers to prefer one term over the other.
For example, el margen (masculine) means 'margin' while la margen means 'river bank'. [23] Similarly, el cura (masculine) means 'priest' while la cura means 'cure'. [24] Like all nouns in Spanish, borrowed nouns must also be masculine or feminine, even when the nouns are borrowed from languages that lack grammatical gender.
Antiphrasis is the rhetorical device of saying the opposite of what is actually meant in such a way that it is obvious what the true intention is. [1] Some authors treat and use antiphrasis just as irony, euphemism or litotes. [2] When the antiphrasal use is very common, the word can become an auto-antonym, [3] having opposite meanings ...
Outside of the Spanish-speaking world, John Wilkins proposed using the upside-down exclamation mark "¡" as a symbol at the end of a sentence to denote irony in 1668. He was one of many, including Desiderius Erasmus , who felt there was a need for such a punctuation mark, but Wilkins' proposal, like the other attempts, failed to take hold.