The Diccionario crítico etimológico castellano e hispánico (Hispanic and Castilian Critical Etymological Dictionary) is the updated compilation of the works of the Diccionario crítico etimológico de la lengua castellana (Critical Etymological Dictionary of the Castilian Tongue), written by the Spanish Catalan linguist Joan Coromines in collaboration with José Antonio Pascual, and published between 1980 and 1991.
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The Dictionary constitutes one of the most important contributions to Romance philology from the central perspective of the Spanish language. Throughout more than six thousand pages, Corominas establishes the origin and biography of Castilian vocabulary, both archaic and modern, Peninsular and Latin American, often referencing other Iberian and Romance languages.
The adjective "Hispanic" is used in this last sense, recognizing that the study of the Spanish language must take into account its interactions with other languages. Thus, the Galician, Galician-Portuguese, Leonese, Asturian, Aragonese, Catalan, and even lost Mozarab areas are mentioned and analyzed in context of their influence in Spanish.
This Dictionary has a comparative nature that helps to "provide great services not only in all aspect of Castilian linguistics, but also, and very notably, for the study of all Romance languages, and even for the whole of the lexical richness of Western civilization." These words from the author are revealing of the enormous work and scientific inquisitiveness of the dictionary.
The central parts of Spanish, of lexical homogeneity, as well as the peripheral, marginal, areas are studied with equal depth and comprehensiveness. This explains that departing from the traditional silence of other monographs, the author's study makes special reference of the Basque language, indispensable in light of its noteworthy contribution to Spanish Vocabulary. The Spanish and Basque languages lived in intimate contact during the first's formation, which gives both a common Latin influence, even though they are typologically unrelated.
The study of the origin, evolution, and history of almost all the words included in the dictionary of the Real Academia Española (Royal Spanish Academy) in addition to a large number of Latin-American vocabulary, which gives the work a more global nature in that it comprehensively illustrates the lexis of the language.
In addition to being etymological, the dictionary is also diachronic: It has a methodological perspective by which etymology is given equal importance with the study of the history of words. The dictionary, absent a historical Spanish dictionary, fills this gap by establishing a chronology for the appearance of vocables throughout the history of texts. Coramines uses dictionaries from medieval to contemporary; from the Etymologiae of Saint Isidore of Seville to the Gran diccionario de la lengua castellana of Anicet de Pagès de Puig, clearly passing through the Universal vocabulario en latín y romance of Alonso de Palencia, the Nebrija castellano-latino, Covarrubias, Oudin, Pichardo, Borao y Cuervo. This pertinent historical documentation is not the only method for establishing lexical chronology. The reference of texts merely indicates written presence and does not absolutely determine appearance or use in spoken language.
Motivated by this, the author reconstructs, based on solid comparative formation, and in relation to credible data from other romance languages, the trajectory of vocables that are absent from written records. He reconstructs alternatives not textually observed, but attested to by existing forms in related languages.
An essential aspect of the dictionary is its critical character. The author is not content to present information, but rather he exhaustively explicates his criteria. In each case he offers a detailed discussion of the proposed etymon, showing with great detail why he accepts or rejects previous scholarship, not without having carefully reviewed how many judgments the analyzed vocable merited.
This characteristic is intellectually very attractive and incites scholarly readers to form their own points of view, to reason with the author the most appropriate solution. The lexical materials of the dictionary are grouped in a particular way: Given the evolutionary and familial characteristic of the vocables, the author orders them alphabetically in lexical families (deriving from the same underlying etymon or one of its forms). The study of these words is not isolated like in traditional dictionaries, but rather keeps in mind the lexical fan, referring to forms that also have been related in the past.
In this way, while searching for a word, one can follow the intricate pathways of the lexical relations and inform oneself of various other aspects, among which the sociolinguistic is a prominent clarifier. The relation amongst vocables is not always direct, because of phonetic evolution, morphological, or semantic derivation, and can come from a loan relation.
The dictionary collects, consequently, the different lexical strata of non-romance origin that have acclimated in Spanish. The author has especially studied the scope of pre-Roman vocables, subtly differentiating between elements that had been considered jointly. This monumental work is an efficacious and coherent compendium of linguistic facts, an exhaustive classification and description, and a treasure of linguistic erudition without precedent.