Betsamita, adj. y ú.t.c.s. com. Habitante de Betsamés, ciudad levítica de la tribu de Judá en la frontera con la de Dan, célebre por haber estado en ella el arca de la alianza y por el castigo que se llevaron sus moradores. Falta esta voz en el Dicc., en el cual figuran otras de esta misma naturaleza, tanto o menos conocida que esta (1901-1908).

4.2. From the same lexical family, we only have the case of the Diccionario enciclopédico hispano-americano (editors: Montaner and Simón), which includes the place name Betsames, but not its demonym (cf. Volume III s.v. Betsames).

4.3. Failing to locate betsamita on online dictionaries, official word banks, and other Internet sources, we have finally found it in the online dictionary of the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society of Pennsylvania, part of the massive, worldwide Jehovah’s Witnesses publishing machine. There, outside of Roman’s Diccionario, we find the term betsamita in the following text (Spanish version): “En 1 Samuel 6:18 la Versión Torres Amat (1953) hace referencia a “la Piedra Grande llamada después Abel”, y la nota al pie de la página lee: “Abel significa ‘luto’ o ‘llanto’: nombre que se cree dado a aquel lugar por causa de la gran mortandad de los betsamitas.” (Watchtower Online Library).

4.4. This does not correlate, however, with the number of times that we find the adjective, either about Josué, el betsamita (the one with the highest number of occurrences) or about the biblical passages referring to the inhabitants of Betsamés. Further study of other versions of the Bible is necessary to register how this demonym is expressed.

5. An archaic word and its Andalusian origin

There are cases within the lexicographic tradition of the Royal Spanish Academy (which we call the academic lexicographical tradition in this essay, too) in which a word is labelled as belonging to an area in the Iberian Peninsula, although it has been detected in Latin America, at least partially or occasionally. Most of the time, it is not clear whether the word in question is archaic or not. In this context, the academic lexicographic tradition tends to treat certain words as peninsular provincialisms. It happens, above all, with provincial terms from Asturias or Andalusia, key sources of lexical transfer towards the New World, as described by the literature on American Spanish vocabulary. Due to the infrequent revision of certain lexicographical articles, this information is often not widely mentioned. Additionally, mutatis mutandis, the diatopic information appearing in the academic lexicographical tradition is about American Spanish, silencing provincial data from Spain. As it can be observed, this is a critical space for further work and research for historical lexicologists.

5.1. Let us take the case of a historical phrase: hilo de acarreto, which is defined as “thin hemp cord” and to which the DLE assigns the diatopic label of Andalucía.

5.2. Rivodó (1889: 174) verified the usage of this word in Latin America by claiming that it is of “common use” in Venezuela. The term is indeed widespread in Latin America and has been recorded there for a long time. In order to corroborate this, rather than CORDE or the BNE Hemeroteca, we rely on the Léxico hispanoamericano, a project by Peter Boyd-Bowman, a US Hispanist. It is important to mention this open-access website, as its contents are extremely useful for anyone who wants to study the etymology of Latin American Spanish. In 1967, Peter Boyd-Bowman began collecting data in a project called the Hispano-American Lexicon (LHA) and in 1971 he published materials for the study of 16th-century American Spanish. However, the amount of collected material was so vast that the possibility of publishing it all on paper was unfeasible. This