Procedures and Progress on the "Dictionary of the Old Spanish Language"

The Seminary for Medieval Spanish Studies at the U of Wisconsin, Madison, has been at work on a dictionary of Old Spanish since 1930. By 1970, the eleven million entries compiled represented only 40% of the known corpus. It was decided that machine-generated concordances would not only speed up the project, but enable it to expand. The Bibliography of Old Spanish Texts was compiled in 1975 for use instead of the older printed dictionaries. Hispanic scholars worldwide contributed machine-readable data, & the core vocabulary was transcribed into the necessary format. The refinement of the procedure resulted in the publication of A Procedural Manual for Entry Establishment (Madison, 1982). The dictionary will be citational & definitional & its first published stage is expected in 1985. 2 Figures, 5 References. A. Darroch