cueva

Forms

cueva f (plural cuevas)^[1] Old Spanish wrote cueba, cueua and cueva, and also the undiphthongised coua or cova.^[2]

Etymology

It is inherited from Vulgar Latin *cova (“hollow (one)”), the feminine of Latin covus (“hollow”), an archaic variant of cavus (“hollow”).^[3][4][5][6] Wiktionary also allows a variant of Late Latin cava, and notes that the word is not related to the English word cove, despite the similar meaning.^[1] An early record of the form without the diphthong is cova, in a Nájera document of 1052.^[2]

The same Vulgar Latin word is Portuguese cova, Galician cova and Catalan cova.^[3][7] Corominas notes that Portuguese still has the adjective covo (“deep”), said of a deep dish, and many place names such as ⟨Vila Cova⟩ and ⟨Penacova⟩.^[3]

According to Corominas the form with ⟨o⟩ was the original one: the ⟨a⟩ of the classical form is owed to the influence of caverna and cavō (“to hollow out”), since a pretonic /ov/ regularly became /av/ in Latin.^[3] He finds the older form in Varro, as a noun for a hollow in the yoke, and in a Greek dialect word for “hollows”, Ancient Greek κόοι (kóoi).^[3] De Vaan reconstructs Proto-Italic *kawo-, from an earlier *kowó-, and Proto-Indo-European *ḱouH-ó- (“hollow”).^[8] Wiktionary gives the root as *ḱewh₁- (“to swell”).^[1]

Earliest recorded meaning

The first record is a charter of 963, with the spelling cueba.^[3][4][2] The Cantar de mio Cid (c. 1140, known from a 14th-century copy) has the word for natural caves: the Cid's men ride on por las cuevas d'Anquita “by the caves of Anquita”.^[9][10]

Semantic evolution

In Alfonso X's Lapidario the word names a deep cave on Mount Sinai and also a hollow inside a body, the cavities that form at the roots of teeth.^[11] His legal prose already has the phrase cueva de ladrones “den of thieves”, from the Gospel saying about the temple, which the dictionaries have recorded ever since for a house where people of bad life gather.^[11][12][5]

Covarrubias in 1611 also gives the senses “wine cellar”, “burial vault” and “an animal's den”.^[13] Autoridades explains that cellars were dug under houses to keep water and wine cool in summer.^[12] The diminutive covachuela came to mean a government office, because the royal secretariats sat in a vault of the palace in Madrid.^[4][14]

The Academy's dictionary of 1884 added the sense “cellar, basement”, which the DLE keeps.^[15][5] In Chile cueva is colloquial for “good luck”; in Cuba and Puerto Rico it is the baseball dugout, and in Argentina a black-market currency exchange.^[5][16][1] The word passed into Tagalog and other languages of the Philippines as kuweba.^[1]

Timeline

• 963 – first record, in a charter, spelt cueba.^[3][2]
• 1052 – the form cova in a document from Nájera.^[2]
• c. 1140 – the Cantar de mio Cid mentions the caves of Anquita.^[9]
• 1250–1279 – Alfonso X's Lapidario uses it for a cave and for a cavity in the body.^[11]
• 1330 – first record of the derivative encovar “to shut up as in a cave”.^[4]
• c. 1495 – Nebrija gives Latin antrum, caverna, specus and spelunca as equivalents.^[17]
• 1513 – first record from the Americas, in Puerto Rico.^[18]
• 1574 – first record of covacha.^[4]
• 1611 – Covarrubias adds the senses “wine cellar” and “burial vault”.^[13]
• 1884 – the Academy's dictionary adds “basement”.^[15]

Meanings

Noun

1. A cave: a natural or man-made hollow under the ground or in a rock: Los pastores se refugiaron en una cueva durante la tormenta.^[5][1]
2. A cellar or basement.^[5][1][19]
3. (figurative) A dark, cramped dwelling; in cueva de ladrones, a den of crooks.^[19][5]
4. (Chile, colloquial) Good luck, a stroke of fortune.^[5][16]
5. (Cuba, Puerto Rico; baseball) The dugout.^[16]
6. (Argentina, euphemistic) A black-market bureau de change.^[1]

Word family

• covacha
• encovar
• recoveco
• covachuela

Related words

• cava
• cavar
• caverna
• cavo
• Latin cavus
• Portuguese cova

References

1. ^ a b c d e f g h i Wiktionary, the free dictionary, https://en.wiktionary.org
2. ^ a b c d e Diccionario del Español Medieval electrónico (DEMel), data publication 2026 (CC BY-SA), Universität Rostock, p. s.v. cueva
3. ^ a b c d e f g Corominas, Joan; Pascual, José A. (1980–1991), Diccionario crítico etimológico castellano e hispánico, 6 vols., Madrid: Gredos, p. 2, 282
4. ^ a b c d e Corominas, Joan (1973), Breve diccionario etimológico de la lengua castellana, 3rd ed., Madrid: Gredos, p. s.v. cueva
5. ^ a b c d e f g h Real Academia Española; Asociación de Academias de la Lengua Española (2014–), Diccionario de la lengua española, 23rd ed., online version 23.8, https://dle.rae.es, p. s.v. cueva
6. ^ Gómez de Silva, Guido (1988), Breve diccionario etimológico de la lengua española, México: Fondo de Cultura Económica / El Colegio de México, p. s.v. cueva
7. ^ García de Diego, Vicente (1985), Diccionario etimológico español e hispánico, 2nd ed., Madrid: Espasa-Calpe (1st ed. 1954), p. 1941
8. ^ de Vaan, Michiel (2008), Etymological Dictionary of Latin and the other Italic Languages, Leiden Indo-European Etymological Dictionary Series 7, Leiden; Boston: Brill
9. ^ a b Real Academia Española (2013–), Corpus del Diccionario histórico de la lengua española (CDH), version 3.1, https://apps.rae.es/CNDHE, p. s.v. cueva
10. ^ Alonso Pedraz, Martín (1986), Diccionario medieval español: desde las Glosas Emilianenses y Silenses (s. X) hasta el siglo XV, 2 vols., Salamanca: Universidad Pontificia de Salamanca, p. 833
11. ^ a b c Kasten, Lloyd A.; Nitti, John J.; Gago Jover, Francisco (2002–), Diccionario de la prosa castellana del Rey Alfonso X, New York: Hispanic Seminary of Medieval Studies (electronic edition 2024), p. s.v. cueva
12. ^ a b Real Academia Española (1726–1739), Diccionario de la lengua castellana (Diccionario de Autoridades), 6 vols., Madrid: Francisco del Hierro, p. 2, 692
13. ^ a b Covarrubias Orozco, Sebastián de (1611), Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española, Madrid: Luis Sánchez (Biblioteca Wordkers transcription, CC BY 4.0), p. 1, 553
14. ^ Bénaben, Michel (2000), Dictionnaire étymologique de l'espagnol, Paris: Ellipses, p. s.v. cueva
15. ^ a b Real Academia Española (1884), Diccionario de la lengua castellana, 12th ed., Madrid: Imprenta de D. Gregorio Hernando (the first Academy edition with etymologies), p. 319
16. ^ a b c Asociación de Academias de la Lengua Española (2010), Diccionario de americanismos, Lima: Santillana; online at https://www.asale.org/damer, p. s.v. cueva
17. ^ Lleal, Coloma (dir.), DICCA-XV: Diccionario del castellano del siglo XV en la Corona de Aragón, Barcelona: Universitat de Barcelona, Grup d'Estudis d'Història de la Llengua (GHCL), https://ghcl.ub.edu/diccaxv, p. s.v. cueva
18. ^ Boyd-Bowman, Peter (2003), Léxico hispanoamericano 1493–1993, ed. Ray Harris-Northall and John J. Nitti, New York: Hispanic Seminary of Medieval Studies, p. s.v. cueva
19. ^ a b Moliner, María (2007), Diccionario de uso del español, 3rd ed., Madrid: Gredos, p. s.v. cueva