reír

Forms

reír (first-person singular present río, first-person singular preterite reí, past participle reído)^[1] The Leonese Libro de Alexandre has the form rier, closer to the Latin, and Old Leonese also had riir.^[2][3] Old Spanish had a strong preterite riso (Berceo's se non riso); Wiktionary notes that the regular outcome would have been a preterite in -s- and a participle *reso or *riso, which were replaced by reí and reído.^[2][1]

Etymology

It is inherited from Latin rīdeō (“to laugh”), a verb used at every period of Spanish and kept in all the Romance languages.^[2][4][5] The Romance forms go back to a spoken Latin infinitive with a short vowel in the ending, rĭdĕre, which had replaced the classical infinitive with a long vowel by the 4th century, when grammarians blamed speakers who said it so.^[6] Castilian and Portuguese later gave up such infinitives stressed on the third syllable from the end, and moved the verb into another conjugation, which gave the Spanish form and Portuguese rir.^[6][2] Wiktionary instead derives the Spanish verb from a Vulgar Latin *rīdīre, perhaps by dissimilation.^[1]

The same Latin verb is Catalan riure, Occitan rire, French rire, Italian ridere and Romanian râde.^[7][6] De Vaan finds no good Indo-European etymology for the Latin verb and rejects the old comparison with Sanskrit व्रीडते (vrīḍate, “is ashamed”) as semantically arbitrary.^[8]

Earliest recorded meaning

The earliest record in the CDH is in La fazienda de Ultra Mar (c. 1200, in a 13th-century copy), in the reflexive sense “to mock”: Joseph's master's wife calls her household and says Aquel Ebreo se quiso reyr de my “that Hebrew wanted to make fun of me”.^[9] Corominas dates the verb from Berceo, between 1220 and 1250, where the reflexive already means simply “to laugh”: por poco se non riso “he very nearly laughed”.^[2][4]

Semantic evolution

Alfonso X's prose uses reír for laughing (a jester fara los omnes reyr “will make people laugh”, 1256), for mocking, for reacting favourably, and in the phrase reírsele el corazón “to rejoice”.^[10] The reflexive reírse, which the other Romance languages mostly keep for “to laugh at someone”, spread much further in Castilian and Portuguese: it was still limited in the Middle Ages and became general in the classical period.^[2]

Poetic use applies the verb to cheerful things, the dawn or the water of a fountain, a use that Latin already knew.^[5][11][12] Colloquially, reírse also means “to scorn” and, of a worn garment, “to begin to split”.^[5][11] Corominas observed that some speakers avoid the preterite se rió and say se puso a reír, and that reyendo and riyendo are heard for riendo.^[2]

Timeline

• c. 1200 – La fazienda de Ultra Mar has reyr “to mock”, the first record in the CDH.^[9]
• 1220–1250 – Berceo uses the verb, its first record according to Corominas.^[4][2]
• 1256 – the Picatrix of Alfonso X: fara los omnes reyr.^[10]
• 1440–1460 – the first record in DICCA-XV, the Castilian of the Crown of Aragon.^[13]
• 1541 – the first record from the Americas, in Michoacán.^[14]
• 1843 – the derivative reidero enters the Academy's dictionary.^[2][4]

Meanings

Verb

1. (intransitive, also reflexive) To laugh: to show joy with movements of the face, often with shaking of the body and inarticulate sounds: Los niños reían en el patio.^[5][1]
2. (transitive) To greet something with laughter: reírle las gracias a alguien “to laugh at someone's jokes”.^[5][11]
3. (intransitive, also reflexive, with de) To make fun of, mock: Se reía de sus propios errores.^[5][1]
4. (literary) Of something pleasant, as the dawn or a fountain: to give joy, look cheerful.^[5]
5. (reflexive, colloquial) To scorn someone or something, to pay no attention to them.^[5]
6. (reflexive, colloquial) Of a worn garment or cloth: to begin to tear or split.^[5][11]

Word family

• reidero
• riente
• reidor

Related words

• risa
• sonreír
• risueño
• ridículo
• irrisión
• Latin rīdeō
• Portuguese rir

Usage notes

The Chilean Manuel Román complained that popular speech in Chile shifts the stress in the forms of this verb (reimos for reímos); he notes that the vowels i and e are two syllables in ri-e-ra, ri-en-do.^[15]

References

1. ^ a b c d e f Wiktionary, the free dictionary, https://en.wiktionary.org
2. ^ a b c d e f g h i Corominas, Joan; Pascual, José A. (1980–1991), Diccionario crítico etimológico castellano e hispánico, 6 vols., Madrid: Gredos, p. 4, 857
3. ^ García de Diego, Vicente (1985), Diccionario etimológico español e hispánico, 2nd ed., Madrid: Espasa-Calpe (1st ed. 1954), p. s.v. ridere
4. ^ a b c d Corominas, Joan (1973), Breve diccionario etimológico de la lengua castellana, 3rd ed., Madrid: Gredos, p. s.v. reír
5. ^ a b c d e f g h i 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. reír
6. ^ a b c Coromines, Joan (1980–2001), Diccionari etimològic i complementari de la llengua catalana, 10 vols., Barcelona: Curial / La Caixa (online ed., Institut d'Estudis Catalans 2024), p. 7, 342
7. ^ Meyer-Lübke, Wilhelm (1935), Romanisches etymologisches Wörterbuch, 3rd ed., Heidelberg: Winter
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. reír
10. ^ 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. reír
11. ^ a b c d Moliner, María (2007), Diccionario de uso del español, 3rd ed., Madrid: Gredos, p. s.v. reír
12. ^ Glare, P. G. W., ed. (2012), Oxford Latin Dictionary, 2nd ed., Oxford: Oxford University Press
13. ^ 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. reír
14. ^ 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. reír
15. ^ Román, Manuel Antonio (1901–1918), Diccionario de chilenismos y de otras voces y locuciones viciosas, 5 vols., Santiago de Chile: Imprenta de San José, p. s.v. reír