MADRID, Jan. 4 (Xinhuanet) -- The Spanish Royal Academy will begin later this month to work on a new historical dictionary that will rewrite meanings of more than 120,000 entries, the project's director told reporters on Wednesday.

    Jose Antonio Pascual, co-author with Joan Corominas of the famous Critical Dictionary of Castillian Spanish, said during the first days of January he would start picking 20 experts to help with the project.

    The academy will work with language academies in a range of Spanish-speaking countries, said Pascual.

    "This work is inconceivable without their help," Pascual said. "It has to include the development of Spanish in the Americas."

    The new dictionary will have 12 volumes and will also be available on the Internet. The Spanish government will provide 1.4 million U.S. dollars each year for the project.

    Pascual said it would help readers understand when certain words fall out of use while others come into being and also to understand how synonyms have evolved.

    The project will make use of the academy's database, especially the Corpus Diachronico del Espanol, a large database showing the evolution of the Spanish language. The writers will use around 50 million data elements to carry out their work. Enditem