The Urgent Spanish Foundation (FundéuRAE), promoted by the Royal Spanish Academy and the EFE Agency, has chosen dana as its word of the year 2024. This noun, which has been incorporated into the ‘Dictionary of the Spanish language’ in its latest update, which was made public on Tuesday, December 10, has prevailed over the other eleven selected candidates: hallucination, mud, fatphobia, inquiokupa, mena, microapartment, narco-boat, pellet, reduflation, touristification and woke.
The choice of this voice responds to two main reasons. Firstly, to its great presence in the media, which increased exponentially after the serious floods caused by this atmospheric phenomenon in the east and south of the Iberian Peninsula at the end of October, in which more than 200 died. people and many others were affected by the multiple destruction caused. Secondly, to his linguistic interest and the doubts that his writing still generates in speakers.
Dana was already a candidate for FundéuRAE’s word of the year in 2019, but she did not win then. The intensity and frequency with which this meteorological phenomenon is repeated, the same with which it is reported in the media, has once again put its name on the front pages. What happened in Spain adds to other strong climate catastrophes that have taken place this year, such as the floods in Peru, central Europe, the United States and Brazil.
The academic dictionary includes this word as a lexicalization of the acronym ‘DANA’, which corresponds to the expression depression isolated at high levels, entirely in lower case. It is included in this work, therefore, as a common noun, written with lowercase letters (the dana, a dana), as a term of meteorology and with the meaning of ‘depression at high levels of the atmosphere, which, isolated from the circulation general atmospheric, it moves independently and can produce large disturbances with very intense precipitation’.
It should be noted that, if you choose to write it as an acronym, that is, with capital letters in all the letters, the plural is the DANA, not the DANAs or the DANAS. The spelling ‘Dana’ is not appropriate, only with an initial capital letter, unless it is the first word of a sentence.
It is a voice that, as can be seen in the academic ‘corpus’, is used mainly in Spain. From the technical field in which this word was born, it made the leap to the media and, finally, landed in the general language and in the academic dictionary.
This is the twelfth time that the FundéuRAE chooses its word of the year. The previous winners were escrache (2013), selfie (2014), refugee (2015), populism (2016), aporophobia (2017), microplastic (2018), emojis (2019), confinement (2020), vaccine (2021), artificial intelligence (2022) and polarization (2023).
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