Abstract

The essay focuses on the Commentario-dizionario italiano della moda by Cesare Meano (first published in 1936), a dictionary created under the well-known fascist linguistic policy. The Commentario contains a number of entries concerning the fashion world, including many chromonyms. This research analyses some of these chromonyms, which are not documented in lexicography before the work of Meano. The essay is structured as a wordlist. Each entry contains the description of the colour term provided by Meano himself, the description of the colour given by modern dictionaries and some examples of the chromonym in use, found in the corpus of Google Books. The paper will enrich the range of chromonyms known up to the present day. It will also be possible to recover the chromatic meaning of some already familiar nouns, documented in lexicography without the same specific value.