8.3. In the European lexicographic tradition, al apa was incorporated for the first time in Alemany (1917) for Chile and the DRAE followed in 1970. We have no data or certainty as to why the Diccionario Histórico de la Academia (1996) added the use of al apa in Ecuador, as well as in Chile.

8.4. All references to al apa that we can find in the Hispano-American Lexicon (LHA) and CREA are, with this meaning, from Chile or referring to Chile.

9. Results

With this small sample, we intended to highlight the pertinence and importance of online word banks and dictionaries, their different levels and aspects. We focused, for example, on the phrase: sentada esta/la baza, by a critical observation of an early 20th-century dictionary. This observation, incidentally, had not been taken into account in the Hispanic lexicographic universe. Indeed, thanks to this observation and its subsequent breakdown and analysis, we detected an interesting case of phonetic associative interference, which could only be corroborated with the identification of the etymology of the word in question. In this case, the use of online lexicographic corpora from other linguistic domains, such as medieval Italian and Occitan and French was essential for testing the hypothesis.

On the other hand, due to the constant review of the etymons that both Corominas and the DLE provide, we wanted to corroborate to what extent the word montaña still has a hypothetical etymon. To accomplish this, we turn to DÉRom, the most up-to-date online etymological lexicographic project for Romance languages. Although the etymon continues to be hypothetical, thanks to the advances in the study of the proto-Romance the etymon has been reformulated and a novel morphological element has been highlighted as a result.

At the same time, the investigation of a word may take us to other spaces on the Internet, which are not related to university projects for databases or online dictionaries. An example of this is the digital library of the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society of Pennsylvania, part of the massive Jehovah’s Witness publishing system.

In other cases, we made use of the word bank directed by the American Hispanist Peter Boyd-Bowman: the Léxico Hispanoamericano (LHA), which is online and freely accessible. This database is the most important for analysing and collating documents regarding Spanish in Latin America. It helped us determine whether a historical word was used, and when and where it was used, as in the case of belduque or hilo de acarreto. In turn, thanks to the LHA we were able to verify that certain terms such as amasandería or al apa are still used only in Chile to this day.

10. Conclusions

As we mentioned in the introduction, any research about lexicon, especially from a historical and dialectological perspective, will always require data search and collating information. This is verified above, where the bibliographic references provide, in themselves, independent critical support. In effect, dictionaries, as well as the information found on the Internet, are key sources for historical lexicology. We also posit that the information provided by the bibliography from official or classical sources will be fundamental, but insufficient for a full investigation. For this reason, the Royal Spanish