Una locución fantasma de La pícara Justina: la unidad dar una almendrada en los diccionarios de la Academia

Resum

Among the uses recorded under the headword almendrado, the Diccionario de la lengua española (2014) of the Royal Spanish Academy includes the idiom dar una almendrada. In order to study the use of this expression, firstly we consulted various different lexicographical and textual sources. From these there emerges a complete picture of the uses and meanings that almendrado has had in the last two centuries. Once it was established that this syntactic unit is not documented either in the 20th or the 21st century, the dictionaries that have recorded it were checked. These show that the origin of dar una almendrada can be traced back to the Diccionario de autoridades, which contains several errors attributable to the text La pícara Justina that give rise to the ghost expression dar una almendrada.