Nebrija's Lexicon & Vocabulario mmxxii

Latino-Hispano, Hispano-Latino

Welcome

Welcome to Nebrija's Lexicon & Vocabulario mmxxii, this website is the result of a project focused on the first modern bilingual dictionaries printed in Europe at the end of the 15th century. These two dictionaries, Latin-Spanish and Spanish-Latin, became the model for the creation of other dictionaries in different languages that appeared during the first half of the 16th century. Among them we have the Latin-Italian dictionary by Calepino printed in 1503, the Latin-English dictionary by Thomas Elyot printed in 1535 and the French-Latin dictionary by Robert Estienne printed in 1549.

Go to the e-Dictionaries section to discover which words, according to the master Aelio Antonio de Nebrija, were used at the end of the 15th century in Hispania to learn Latin. This tool will allow you to explore the contents of the Latin and Castilian dictionaries simultaneously, just type in the word you wish to find.

You will also find the option to explore the digital versions of these two incunabula in the Dictionaries section and some explanations about how the information was extracted from them for the creation of this website.

We hope this site might satisfy your curiosity and academic needs when diving into the pioneer and Herculean work done by Nebrija.

The main goals of this website are:

  • To maintain alive Nebrija’s intention of creating a tool to teach Latin to those who, out of curiosity, approach the classic language through their mother tongue [Castilian].
  • To highlight Nebrija’s role in the history of dictionaries, not only as a grammarian, but also as a lexicographer.
  • To establish a foundational corpus for future research projects on Nebrija’s dictionaries.
  • To offer an open access tool to the scholarly community interested in the first modern dictionaries.
  • To define the correct number of entries for the princeps editions of both dictionaries.