[2] The idea of creating the dictionary arose from the determination of the Philological Section of the Institute to normalise and unify the Catalan language.
After four years' preparation, the Philological Section published the first edition of the "General Dictionary of the Catalan language" (DGLC), the DIEC's predecessor, in 1932, and it managed to unify the spelling system, cleanse the lexicon, fix the grammar and introduce neologisms.
During the decade of 1980s Catalan authors and writers began to ask the IEC to revise the dictionary, because they considered that the language had evolved quite a lot since the time of Fabra.
From the start, both versions met with considerable success: 17,000 copies of the book were sold and 644,352 consultations via the internet were counted in the first two months after its appearance.
Apart from updating the lexicon, the main advances in the new dictionary are its size (it is a third larger than the DGLC), the way in which the articles are ordered and the perfecting of the spelling.