La historia de <i>desapercibido</i> por <i>inadvertido</i>

Abstract

The article addresses the history of the use of the word desapercibido in the sense of inadvertido, using documentation from the Spanish Royal Academy’s diachronic corpus of Spanish (CORDE) and different lexical lists, as well as the opinions of authors of lexical and lexicographical works from the middle of the 19th and beginning of the 20th c. regarding the opportuneness of this change. After the dispute between those in favour of innovation and those who disparaged the word as a Gallicism, the change took place, and tracing the word in dictionaries of the Academy allows us to conclude that even though its dissemination was due to a Gallicism, its provenance and semantic change are strictly Spanish.