Historical Review of the Reasons for Admitting New Words to the Language and the Dictionary

This article analyses the reasons used to incorporate new words to the language and the dictionary, reasons that oscillate between need and usage, and around which other criteria emerge, such as prestige, opportunity, and good grammatical formation. Purist tendencies and, above all, a desire to defend the unity of the language, owing to the danger of fragmentation, lead some authors to invoke the criterion of need; in contrast, others, supporters of innovation, defend the criterion of usage, not educated usage, but rather frequent and general usage.