is why, in 1982, the Hispanic Seminary of Medieval Studies began publishing the LHA on microfiche. With advances in computing, in 1994, thanks to the National Endowment for the Humanities, the LHA was transformed into a database on CD-ROM. Finally, in 2015, the Graduate School of the University of Wisconsin-Madison published the online version of the LHA, which is today is freely accessible. In fact, on the LHA hilo de acarreto is recorded in 1512 for Puerto Rico, in 1544 for Puebla, in 1559 for Potosí, in 1683 for the Kingdom of New Granada and also in 1780 for the River Plate area, the most recent document within the corpus.

5.3 In Chile this lexical unit is known and used since colonial times, as demonstrated in the Histórica relación by P. Ovalle (l. I, c. IV): “Sacan también el hilo que llaman de acarreto, y otros géneros de cordeles que sirven para varios efectos” (2007 [1646]).

5.4. Within the wider scope of Spanish lexicography, the most remote mention found in a dictionary by the Royal Academy corresponds to the 1780 edition and includes the label Andalucía, something that we continue to verify with Alcalá Venceslada (1980 [1933]) in his Vocabulario andaluz. This is cited by Alvar Ezquerra (2000) in his Tesoro de las hablas andaluzas, who mentions Alcalá Venceslada’s Vocabulario. The term is also found in the Canary Islands, according to the Diccionario Histórico del Español de Canarias (DHECan), a project directed by Corrales and Corbella, who dates it to 1519, while citing Peter Boyd Bowman’s lexicon for reporting its presence in Latin America.

5.5. Hilo de acarreto has been registered in CORDE, in Relación del origen y suceso de los Xarifes, published in Seville in 1575 by Diego de Torres Bollo, an author from Zamora. The word only has a second occurrence in CORDE for Spain: in 1653, by Bernabé Cobo and his Historia del Nuevo Mundo. Later, it is only documented in Peru (1685, Jacinto Hevia Bustos, Vejamen al doctor Antonio Correas) and the Philippines (1754, Historia general de Filipinas). There are no references in CREA, so we think that the term, of Andalusian origin, quickly spread to the Canary Islands (where it remains) and to Latin America and the Philippines.

5.6. The term hilo de acarreto must have been used frequently in Latin America, as the Hemeroteca digital presents numerous cases from Mexico since 1729. Interestingly, it has ceased to be used in Spain (it does not appear in Moliner, nor DEA 1999 nor CLAVE) while it remains in the Canary Islands. Likewise, the DRAE continues to label it as an Andalusian phrase. Nevertheless, the confirmation that the phrase settled early in Latin America was given by Boyd-Bowman’s LHA corpus.

6. Polygenesis?

Sometimes no matter how often the monogenetic thesis of a word origin is confirmed, data unveiled through philological research may reveal one or two surprises, as it the case of a word considered exclusive to Latin America, described below.

6.1. We will use as an example the Chilean word amasandería (‘bakery’), as well as amasandero (‘person who kneads the flour dough to make bread and other similar foods’), which are words so characteristic of Chilean Spanish that they are usually treated as strict chilenismos.

6.2. However, a comparison with other lexicographical corpora has demonstrated the term’s use outside of Chile, in Colombia, as verified by Cuervo in his Apuntaciones. In the editions of 1867-1872, 1876 and 1885, Cuervo adds amasandería