Abstract

This study analyzes part of the lexicon of «Book Sixteen» and «Book Seventeen» of the Comentarios de Erudición by Bartolomé Jiménez Patón, in light of the discovery, a decade ago, of volume four of this great work that constitutes a compendium of the writings of the prolific Manchegan author. The data gathered indicate that our author’s lexicon is characterized by a curious duality: it is at the same time conservative, to the extent that it continues to resort to words and acceptations that doubtless were considered to be archaic in standard Spanish; and it is innovative as well, incorporating established Golden Age neologisms and occasionally introducing new meanings for extant words, as well as inventing new words of his own.