dueño

Forms

dueño m (plural dueños, feminine dueña, feminine plural dueñas)^[1] Old Spanish spellings include duenno, dueno, donno, dono and the shortened duen.^[2] The feminine is dueña; in classical Spanish the masculine dueño was also used of a woman, above all in love poetry (dueño mío).^[3][4]

Etymology

It is inherited from Vulgar Latin domnus, the shortened form of Latin dominus (“master of a household, lord”).^[3][5][6] Wiktionary calls the short form Late Latin; the OLD finds it written with the stem domn- in inscriptions.^[1][7] The same word gave the titles don and doña, which were reduced because they were spoken without stress before a name, while the stressed noun became dueño and dueña.^[5][3]

The noun stayed fully alive only in Portuguese dono and Galician dono, beside Asturian dueñu and Aragonese dueño.^[3][8][1] The old don “lord” of Catalan and Occitan died out after the 13th century, and the same happened in France and Italy, where Italian donno is archaic; the feminine lives on in Catalan dona, Italian donna and French dame.^[3][9] Further cognates are Romanian domn and Romanian doamnă.^[10][1]

The Latin noun is formed from domus (“house”).^[7][11] De Vaan sets up Proto-Italic *dom-o/u-no- (“of the house”);^[11] Pinault's Proto-Indo-European *dom-h₃n-o- (“who profits from the house”) is one possibility, but the word may simply mean “he of the house”.^[11] The word for “house” itself goes back to Proto-Indo-European *dem- (“to build”).^[1]

Earliest recorded meaning

DEMel lists dueno in the Glosas Emilianenses, which it dates to about 950.^[2] Corominas's first records are the form domno in a charter from Huesca of 1062–1063 and dueño in the Cantar de mio Cid.^[3][5][12] The legal prose of Alfonso X uses it for the owner of a thing: „furto faze todo omne que toma la cosa agena. no lo sabiendo su duenno” “theft is committed by every man who takes another's property without its owner knowing”.^[13]

Semantic evolution

Old and classical Spanish copied an Arabic turn of phrase in which the word for “owner” means only “the one of”: el dueño de la razón “the plaintiff” in the Fuero Juzgo, el dueño de las quejas “the one who complained” and many similar phrases in Lope de Vega;^[4] Corominas calls it one of the most striking Arabic calques in Spanish.^[3] The use of the masculine for a woman, common in the classical language, is put down instead to the bad sense that dueña had taken in love talk.^[3] The Diccionario de Autoridades explains it in the same way: women were called dueño because dueña had come to mean a lady's duenna, and an adjective with it stayed masculine.^[4]

The Academy's 1817 dictionary recorded the proverb A donde no está el dueño, ahí está su duelo “where the owner is absent, there is his loss”.^[14] Salvá in 1846 and the Academy in 1899 noted that lovers said dueño mío, never dueña mía.^[15][16] Today the word means above all an owner, of a business, a house or a pet;^[17] dueño de sí mismo is someone in control of himself, and hacerse dueño de algo is to take control of it.^[6][17] In the Dominican Republic and Bolivia dueño de casa is a landlord.^[18]

Timeline

• c. 950 – the spelling dueno in the Glosas Emilianenses.^[2]
• 1062–1063 – a charter from Huesca has the form domno.^[3]
• c. 1140 – the Cantar de mio Cid has dueño.^[3][12]
• 1256–1300 – the legal prose of Alfonso X uses duenno for the owner of stolen property.^[13]
• 1513 – Nebrija glosses dueño por señor with Latin dominus.^[19]
• 1587 – the first record from the Americas, in Chile, of the owner of a ship.^[20]
• 1726–1739 – the Diccionario de Autoridades notes the masculine used for women.^[4]
• 1817 – the Academy records the proverb about the absent owner.^[14]
• 1899 – the Academy gives the etymology from Latin domnus.^[16]

Meanings

Noun

1. owner, proprietor; a person who has control or lordship over someone or something.^[6][1]
2. The master of a house, in relation to its servants.^[6][17]
3. (humorous or dated) The beloved, said to a man or a woman: Ven conmigo, dulce dueño.^[17]
4. (obsolete) A tutor who brings up a child.^[6]
5. (Dominican Republic, Bolivia) In dueño de casa: a landlord;^[18] (Chile) the head of a household.^[18]

Word family

• adueñarse
• duende

Related words

• don
• dueña
• doña
• doncella
• domeñar
• dominar
• dominio
• dómine
• domingo
• Latin dominus
• Portuguese dono

Usage notes

Dueño de sí mismo “self-possessed”, hacerse dueño de “to take control of” and ser muy dueño de hacer algo “to be quite free to do something” are fixed phrases.^[17]

References

1. ^ a b c d e f g Wiktionary, the free dictionary, https://en.wiktionary.org
2. ^ a b c Diccionario del Español Medieval electrónico (DEMel), data publication 2026 (CC BY-SA), Universität Rostock, p. s.v. dueño
3. ^ a b c d e f g h i j Corominas, Joan; Pascual, José A. (1980–1991), Diccionario crítico etimológico castellano e hispánico, 6 vols., Madrid: Gredos, p. 2, 529
4. ^ a b c d Real Academia Española (1726–1739), Diccionario de la lengua castellana (Diccionario de Autoridades), 6 vols., Madrid: Francisco del Hierro, p. 3, 348
5. ^ a b c Corominas, Joan (1973), Breve diccionario etimológico de la lengua castellana, 3rd ed., Madrid: Gredos, p. s.v. dueño
6. ^ 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. dueño
7. ^ a b Glare, P. G. W., ed. (2012), Oxford Latin Dictionary, 2nd ed., Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. s.v. dominus
8. ^ García de Diego, Vicente (1985), Diccionario etimológico español e hispánico, 2nd ed., Madrid: Espasa-Calpe (1st ed. 1954), p. art. 2342
9. ^ Cortelazzo, Manlio; Zolli, Paolo (1999), Dizionario etimologico della lingua italiana, 2nd ed. by Manlio Cortelazzo and Michele A. Cortelazzo, Bologna: Zanichelli, p. s.v. donno
10. ^ Meyer-Lübke, Wilhelm (1935), Romanisches etymologisches Wörterbuch, 3rd ed., Heidelberg: Winter, p. 2741
11. ^ a b c de Vaan, Michiel (2008), Etymological Dictionary of Latin and the other Italic Languages, Leiden Indo-European Etymological Dictionary Series 7, Leiden; Boston: Brill
12. ^ a b Boggs, R. S.; Kasten, Lloyd; Keniston, Hayward; Richardson, H. B. (1946), Tentative Dictionary of Medieval Spanish, 2 vols., Chapel Hill, N.C., p. 201
13. ^ a b 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. dueño
14. ^ a b Real Academia Española (1817), Diccionario de la lengua castellana, 5th ed., Madrid: Imprenta Real, p. 338
15. ^ Salvá, Vicente (1846), Nuevo diccionario de la lengua castellana, París: Librería de Don Vicente Salvá, p. 420
16. ^ a b Real Academia Española (1899), Diccionario de la lengua castellana, 13th ed., Madrid: Imprenta de los Sres. Hernando y Compañía, p. 372
17. ^ a b c d e Moliner, María (2007), Diccionario de uso del español, 3rd ed., Madrid: Gredos, p. s.v. dueño
18. ^ 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. dueño, ña
19. ^ Nebrija, Antonio de (1513), Vocabulario español-latino, Salamanca, ed. Marina Vidal Díez (2007), Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes, p. 339
20. ^ 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. dueño