María Moliner (30 March 1900 – 22 January 1981) was a Spanish librarian and lexicographer. She is perhaps best known for her Diccionario de uso del español, first published in 1966–1967, when she completed the work started in 1952. Biography María Juana Moliner Ruiz was the eldest daughter of Enrique Moliner, a doctor and son of a doctor, and Matilde Ruiz. At the age of two, her family moved from Zaragoza to Almazán in the border province of Soria. While a teenager her father left for Argentina and never came back, while Moliner, according to her son Fernando, lived with her mother, sister Matilde and brother Enrique in severe poverty. She pursued her Bachillerato at the Instituto General y Técnico Cardenal Cisneros, and obtained a degree in History in 1921 from the University of Zaragoza. She married Fernando Ramón Ferrando, a physics graduate, in 1925 and had four children. Years later the couple moved to Valencia. In 1946, Moliner was put in charge of the library at the Superior Technical School of Industrial Engineers in Madrid, until her retirement in 1970. In the early 1950s, she started work on her Diccionario de uso del español, getting up at about five in the morning, working a little, watering her flowers, going to work, having a small siesta before returning to her dictionary work. Her method was to look up words, read newspapers and note words she had heard in the street. Diccionario de uso del español In 1952 her son Fernando brought her a book from Paris that caught her attention, the Learner's Dictionary of Current English by A.S. Hornby (1948). She had noticed the shortcomings of the DRAE, the official dictionary published by the Real Academia Española (Spanish Royal Academy), she was already making notes on terms, so this English book gave her the idea of making a dictionary. By then, she began composing her Diccionario de uso del español which she thought she would have finished within two years but in reality it took more than fifteen years of work at her home. In 1955, at the request of the academic Dámaso Alonso, who followed her work with interest and had connections with the Gredos publishing. Moliner eventually signed a contract with them for the future publication of her dictionary, whose typographic edition was extremely laborious. The first edition (and the only one authorized by her) was published in