desaparecido

Forms

desaparecido (feminine desaparecida, masculine plural desaparecidos, feminine plural desaparecidas)^[1]

Etymology

It is from Spanish desaparecer + -ido: the past participle of the verb, used as an adjective and a noun.^[2][3][4] The verb combines des- with aparecer, which continues Late Latin apparescere.^[5][6] Corominas dates the verb to the 13th century.^[7] The CDH has it in a text of 1293: Old Spanish desaparesçieron (“they vanished”).^[8]

Earliest recorded meaning

The HSMS texts have the form first in Fernando Bernal's romance Floriseo, printed at Valencia in 1516.^[9] The 1732 Diccionario de Autoridades still treats it as the participle of desaparecer, defining it as what has vanished and been hidden suddenly from sight.^[10]

Semantic evolution

Terreros and Domínguez list it only as a participle.^[11][12] In 1897 Membreño recorded the legal use of Honduras, where desaparecido is an absent person whose death the law may come to presume.^[13] A Mexican text of 1903 uses los desaparecidos for the dead, the euphemism the DLE records as its second sense.^[14][2]

The modern dictionaries define the person whose whereabouts are unknown and of whom it is not known whether he or she is alive.^[2][15][16] In the second half of the 20th century the noun came to name the victims of forced disappearance, above all under the state terrorism of Latin American military regimes, the sense Moliner gives as “a victim of the repression of a political regime”.^[3][4] The DLE's verb desaparecer has a matching transitive use, “to make someone disappear”, mostly in the Americas.^[5]

Timeline

• 1516 – the form desaparecido in Fernando Bernal's Floriseo.^[9]
• 1732 – the Diccionario de Autoridades defines it as the participle “vanished suddenly from sight”.^[10]
• 1897 – Membreño records the legal sense “absent person” in Honduras.^[13]
• 1903 – a Mexican text calls the dead los desaparecidos.^[14]

Meanings

Adjective

1. Of a person: missing, whose whereabouts are unknown and of whom it is not known whether he or she is alive.^[2][1]
2. (euphemistic) dead (muerto).^[2]

Noun

1. A missing person: La policía publicó la lista de los desaparecidos tras la riada.^[16][1]
2. A victim of forced disappearance (desaparición forzada), especially under the military regimes of Latin America in the second half of the 20th century.^[3][4]

Related words

• desaparición
• aparecido

References

1. ^ a b c d Wiktionary, the free dictionary, https://en.wiktionary.org
2. ^ a b c d e 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. desaparecido
3. ^ a b c Wikcionario (Spanish Wiktionary), es.wiktionary.org, p. s.v. desaparecido
4. ^ a b c Moliner, María (2007), Diccionario de uso del español, 3rd ed., Madrid: Gredos, p. s.v. desaparecido
5. ^ a b 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. desaparecer
6. ^ 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. aparecer
7. ^ Corominas, Joan (1973), Breve diccionario etimológico de la lengua castellana, 3rd ed., Madrid: Gredos, p. s.v. parecer
8. ^ Real Academia Española (2013–), Corpus del Diccionario histórico de la lengua española (CDH), version 3.1, https://apps.rae.es/CNDHE, p. s.v. desaparecer
9. ^ a b Hispanic Seminary of Medieval Studies (2026), Old Spanish Textual Archive (OSTA): semi-paleographic transcriptions of Old Spanish texts, ed. Francisco Gago Jover et al., https://www.hispanicseminary.org, p. s.v. desaparecido
10. ^ a b Real Academia Española (1726–1739), Diccionario de la lengua castellana (Diccionario de Autoridades), 6 vols., Madrid: Francisco del Hierro, p. 3, 102
11. ^ Terreros y Pando, Esteban de (1786–1793), Diccionario castellano con las voces de ciencias y artes y sus correspondientes de las tres lenguas francesa, latina e italiana, 4 vols., Madrid: Viuda de Ibarra, p. 1, 619
12. ^ Domínguez, Ramón Joaquín (1846–1847), Diccionario nacional o gran diccionario clásico de la lengua española, 2 vols., Madrid: Establecimiento Léxico-Tipográfico de R. J. Domínguez, p. 563
13. ^ a b Membreño, Alberto (1897), Hondureñismos: vocabulario de los provincialismos de Honduras, 2nd ed., Tegucigalpa: Tipografía Nacional, p. 60
14. ^ a b 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. desaparecido
15. ^ Real Academia Española (2001), Diccionario de la lengua española, 22nd ed., Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, p. s.v. desaparecido
16. ^ a b Battaner Arias, Paz (dir.) (2017), Diccionario general de la lengua española VOX, Barcelona: Larousse Editorial, p. s.v. desaparecido