La Real Academia Española

The Royal Spanish Academy

We have probably all heard of the RAE, but do we really know what it is and, more importantly, what resources it can provide us as teachers of Spanish?
The Royal Spanish Academy (RAE) is a cultural institution aimed at linguistic regularisation in the Spanish-speaking world. It was founded in 1714 by Juan Manuel Fernández Pacheco y Zúñiga. It currently has free access for all its users on its official website: https://www.rae.es 

What is it for?
It is a source of reference and learning for any doubt related to the Spanish language. Its online platform has up to five dictionaries where users can access free of charge:
Diccionario de la lengua española (DEL): this is a Spanish language dictionary published and produced by the Royal Spanish Academy.
Diccionario panhispánico de dudas (DPD) (Pan-Hispanic Dictionary of Doubts) provides answers to the most common doubts raised by the use of Spanish in each of the levels that can be distinguished in the analysis of linguistic elements: the phonographic, as it resolves doubts of an orthological (on pronunciation) and orthographic (on spelling, accentuation and punctuation) nature; the morphological, as it provides guidance on the most frequent hesitations that occur on the level of nominal morphology (plurals, feminine and derived forms) and verbal morphology (forms of conjugation); the syntactic, by clarifying doubts on construction and regime, concordance, form and use of locutions, etc.; and the lexicosemantic, by clarifying doubts on construction and regimen, concordance, form and use of locutions, etc. It is also lexicosemantic, as it examines and corrects numerous lexical improprieties, as well as offering guidance on the use of neologisms and foreign words.
Diccionario panhispánico del español jurídico (DPEJ): it covers the legal language of the Hispanic-American community, and links directly to the legislation of the different countries that make it up. It is universally accessible and free of charge and is available for consultation online.
Diccionario histórico de la lengua española (DHLE): is a digital native dictionary that aims to describe in its entirety (on the diatopic, diastratic and chronological axis) the history of the lexicon of the Spanish language.
Diccionario de americanismos: it is a lexical repertoire that aims to compile all the words typical of the Spanish of America.

It is also another source of linguistic news that offers new orthographic and other information.

How do I use it?
We can make different queries from the official website or download the application free of charge to our mobile devices. We simply select the type of dictionary and search for the word or question we need to know.

It is a very useful resource for teachers, students of Spanish or any Spanish speaker. We can also find it on social networks such as Twitter, Instagram where they make very interesting daily publications and respond to users' doubts.