On 4 October 2001, at the headquarters of the Royal Spanish Academy, a Collaboration Agreement was signed between the Fundación Pro Real Academia Española and the Fundación Rafael del Pino.
The purpose of the Agreement was the preparation, in collaboration with the corresponding Academies, of a new "Student's Dictionary", with the aim of familiarising the youngest Spanish speakers, who are responsible for forging the Spanish of the 21st century, with its lexical repertoire. The Student's Dictionary covers a space not always served by traditional school dictionaries, dedicating its efforts to a range of users, both Spanish and Spanish-American, which includes students between the ages of 12 and 18.
The aim of the work was to become an effective and indispensable tool not only in language classes, but also in the rest of the subjects taught in schools. The Diccionario del Estudiante was conceived as a selective inventory of the Spanish lexicon of our time, with the aim of serving students of the indicated age level.
As it is intended for all Spanish-speaking countries, it includes the most common and widespread American lexicon. The Student's Dictionary is made up of a set of some 38,000 words, selected according to usage criteria, and aims to include the basic vocabulary that a secondary and high school student should incorporate into his or her linguistic competence, or at least be familiar with.
The Learner's Dictionary lists essential Spanish synonyms and cognates. It also gives special relevance to the treatment of grammatical words. A scholarly dictionary must take scrupulous care in the treatment of these types of words, since they constitute a field in which the authoritative voice of the Academy is expected.
It also includes black and white plates. At the same time, the various documents that cover the specific treatment of the articles in the Diccionario del Estudiante have been completed and perfected. They deal with all aspects related to the writing method and structure of the Dictionary: thematic writing models, grammatical models, lemmatisation criteria, synonyms, related words and the treatment of locutions, among other issues.
To date, three editions of the Diccionario del estudiante have appeared. The first was presented on 15 September 2005 at a ceremony held at the Rafael del Pino Foundation presided over by the Prince and Princess of Asturias. In 2011, a second edition was published which added to the previous one, always adjusting them to the method of this work, a selection of new words and meanings, approved by the academies for the edition of the DLE, which would be published in 2014; in addition, the complete text of the work was revised to adapt it to the norms established in the new Ortografía de la lengua española (2010).
A third edition of the work appeared in 2016, which obeyed, on the one hand, "the permanent need of any lexical repertoire to guarantee its currency; on the other hand, the academic will to apply decisions set out in the twenty-third edition of the Diccionario de la lengua española (2014), the last in its series", as stated in the note on the preliminaries to the third edition.