Asno y Burro – historia de una sinonimia

The objective of this article is to investigate the presence and status of two lexical items in the Spanish language: asno ‘donkey’ and burro ‘donkey’. If we accept, as some sources do, that they are synonyms, several questions arise: what kind of synonymy do they represent? And how does a linguistic system maintain two interchangeable terms? To answer these questions, we examine the etymology of both lexemes, trace their presence in Spanish over time, analyse their documentation and treatment in dictionaries, assess their frequency of use, and identify the types of texts in which they appear. The analysis is based on various Spanish corpora, and in discussing their synonymy, we draw on several lexicological studies, with particular attention to the perspective of M.L. Regueiro Rodríguez.