Historical study of quimón, quimono and quimona in the Spanish language

Abstract

The word “quimón” appears in the fourth edition of DRAE, from 1803, for whose etymology the Academy proposed a Japanese etymon; however, RAE, in the latest publication of the Diccionario de la lengua española, changed the etymological descriptor for “quimón”, explaining that Portuguese acted as an intermediary language between Japanese and Spanish. On the other hand, in current Spanish we also use the Japanese loanword “quimono”, which seems to have been introduced into the Western languages quite recently. Thus, the main objectives of this article are to examine in detail the etymological descriptors offered by the RAE and study the historical behavior of those loanwords from their first documented occurrences. Besides this, we have also analyzed an American variant, “quimona”, which seems to be a morphological specialization with a derived meaning from the first definition of “quimono”.