tamaño

Forms

tamaño (feminine tamaña, masculine plural tamaños, feminine plural tamañas)^[1] Old Spanish wrote tamanno as one word or, still aware of its origin, as tan manno; the Crónica de 1344 also has atán maño.^[2] DEMel also records the spellings tanmanno and talmaño.^[3]

Etymology

It is inherited from Old Spanish tamanno, which continues the phrase inherited from Latin tam (“so”) magnus (“great, big”) “so great”.^[2][4][5][1] The phrase is frequent in Latin texts from Hispania: in inscriptions and in the Peregrinatio Aetheriae (early 6th century), which most scholars believe was written in Spain.^[2]

The combination survives only in Spanish and Portuguese and in a few dialects of Rhaetia and northern Italy; medieval Catalan had it too, as in Muntaner's Old Catalan tamanyes, but soon lost it.^[2] Old Spanish also had cuamaño (“how big”), which joined the same adjective to quam (“how”).^[2]

The Latin adverb is an old accusative feminine of a demonstrative stem, from Proto-Indo-European *teh₂m.^[6][7] The adjective goes back to Proto-Italic *magnos, from *m̥ǵh₂nós.^[1][6]

Earliest recorded meaning

It is first recorded in charters of 1071 and 1090, and it is already frequent in Berceo.^[2][4] At first it was only an adjective with a comparative sense, “as big (as), so big”, as in Latin.^[4] Alfonso X's Lapidario (1250–1279) has tamanna quantidat “so great a quantity”.^[8]

Semantic evolution

The comparative use lasted through the Golden Age: in Don Quixote a head es tamaña como un gran cuero de vino “is as big as a great wineskin”.^[2] Late in the 16th century Fernando de Herrera already called it out of use among good writers, but it survived, at least in literature.^[2] About 1600 it took an absolute sense, “very big”, or by antithesis “very small”, as Autoridades notes.^[2][4][9]

In much of the Americas the sense “very big” prevails, often with tamañito and tamañazo to express the two opposites; in Argentina tamaño usually means “huge”, while Chile keeps the comparative sense.^[2] The DAMER records “big, tall” in Honduras and El Salvador, and the plural as a euphemism for “courage” in Mexico.^[10]

The noun “size” is a later creation: Corominas first finds it in López de Arenas (1633) and says it took another century and a half to become general.^[2][4] He states that Autoridades lacks it, but the dictionary's sixth volume (1739) has the noun, with a quotation from Cervantes's Persiles.^[2][9] DICCA-XV records the noun as early as 1498.^[11]

Timeline

• 1071 – first record, in a charter.^[2][4]
• c. 1230 – Berceo uses it often, written as one word or as tan manno.^[2][3]
• 1277 – Alfonso X's astronomical works use tanmanno for the size of a circle.^[8]
• 1498 – the first record of the noun in DICCA-XV.^[11]
• 1513 – Nebrija gives Latin tantus as its equivalent.^[12]
• 1526 – the first record from the Americas, in Honduras.^[13]
• 1611 – Covarrubias explains it as Latin tam magnus.^[14]
• 1633 – López de Arenas uses the noun “size”.^[2]
• 1739 – Autoridades has both the noun and the adjective.^[9]

Meanings

Adjective

1. As big or as small (as); so big: Traía una piedra tamaña como un puño.^[5][15][1]
2. (before the noun) Such a great, such a: Nadie esperaba tamaña generosidad.^[15][16]
3. Very big or very small.^[5]
4. (Honduras, El Salvador) Big, tall.^[10]

Noun

1. size: the volume or dimensions of something: El tamaño de la caja no importa.^[5][1]

Related words

• magno
• magnitud
• tan

Usage notes

Tamaño natural is “life size”, said of a picture or model the size of the thing it shows.^[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 j k l m n o Corominas, Joan; Pascual, José A. (1980–1991), Diccionario crítico etimológico castellano e hispánico, 6 vols., Madrid: Gredos, p. 5, 394
3. ^ a b Diccionario del Español Medieval electrónico (DEMel), data publication 2026 (CC BY-SA), Universität Rostock, p. s.v. tamaño
4. ^ a b c d e f Corominas, Joan (1973), Breve diccionario etimológico de la lengua castellana, 3rd ed., Madrid: Gredos, p. s.v. tamaño
5. ^ a b c d 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. tamaño
6. ^ a b de Vaan, Michiel (2008), Etymological Dictionary of Latin and the other Italic Languages, Leiden Indo-European Etymological Dictionary Series 7, Leiden; Boston: Brill
7. ^ Glare, P. G. W., ed. (2012), Oxford Latin Dictionary, 2nd ed., Oxford: Oxford University Press
8. ^ 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. tamaño
9. ^ a b c Real Academia Española (1726–1739), Diccionario de la lengua castellana (Diccionario de Autoridades), 6 vols., Madrid: Francisco del Hierro, p. 6, 219
10. ^ a b Asociación de Academias de la Lengua Española (2010), Diccionario de americanismos, Lima: Santillana; online at https://www.asale.org/damer, p. s.v. tamaño
11. ^ a b 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. tamaño
12. ^ Nebrija, Antonio de (1513), Vocabulario español-latino, Salamanca, ed. Marina Vidal Díez (2007), Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes, p. 420
13. ^ 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. tamaño
14. ^ Covarrubias Orozco, Sebastián de (1611), Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española, Madrid: Luis Sánchez (Biblioteca Wordkers transcription, CC BY 4.0), p. 1317
15. ^ a b c Moliner, María (2007), Diccionario de uso del español, 3rd ed., Madrid: Gredos, p. s.v. tamaño
16. ^ Battaner Arias, Paz (dir.) (2017), Diccionario general de la lengua española VOX, Barcelona: Larousse Editorial, p. s.v. tamaño