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Friday: January 8, 2010

Now what?

Filed under: — site admin @ 10:44 PM GMT-0500

My Oxford Spanish Dictionary, third edition on CD-Rom, arrived today, 65% off in their Christmas sale. The first word I looked up, ‘navecilla’, was not in it. It must mean ‘little ship’, but it was disconcerting not being able to check. In one 66-line poem of Quevedo, I found two other words that were entirely missing, along with several more that seem to have changed their meanings in the last 400 years. ‘Avariento’ must mean ‘greedy’, but I still don’t know what ‘dina’ means, or even whether it is a noun, adjective, or verb. It’s obviously not a ‘dyne’ (unit of power), the only modern meaning, or a small-d ‘Dinah’, and there is no obvious English or Latin cognate, as with ‘avariento’. Very frustrating. Is there some other Spanish-English dictionary that includes ‘obs.’ or ‘arch.’ words used by well-known older authors?