The RAE launches its first thesaurus in three centuries

The Royal Spanish Academy has presented its first Dictionary of Synonyms and Antonyms in three centuries of history. This collective work, agreed upon by the 23 language academies, brings together more than 255,000 synonyms and 20,000 antonyms. It includes colloquial terms such as borrachera, papalina or chupeta, reflecting the diversity of global Spanish.

Real Academia Española headquarters interior, linguists collaborating around a large wooden table while passing a heavy printed dictionary between them, open pages showing dense columns of synonyms and antonyms, colorful sticky notes marking entries for words like borrachera and chupeta, glowing digital tablets displaying collaborative editing software from 23 academias, technical illustration style, warm library lighting, detailed book binding and paper texture, scholarly atmosphere, photorealistic academic render

The lexical backend: how a database of 275,000 terms was built 📚

To assemble this corpus, the academies implemented a distributed consensus system similar to a collaborative repository. Each entry was validated by philologists from different regions, ensuring coverage of variants such as Argentine voseo or Spanish leísmo. The result is a semantic network of related terms, where each word has contextual weight. The user's mental API will be able to query from chupeta (colloquial for drunkenness) to ebriedad (formal), all within the same lexicographic data structure.

Borrachera, papalina or chupeta: the dictionary you needed to look good at dinners 🍻

Finally, you will be able to refer to your state of inebriation properly: you will no longer say you are drunk, but rather suffer from a technical drunkenness. And if your brother-in-law insists he is an expert in synonyms, set him straight with the official entry for papalina. The RAE has your linguistic back. Now they just need to add the entry for moral hangover the next day.