Wilson & Bappu (1957ApJ...125..661W) have shown the existence of a remarkable correlation between the width of the emission in the core of the K line of CaII and the absolute visual magnitude of late-type stars. Here we present a new calibration of the Wilson-Bappu effect based on a sample of 119 nearby stars. We use, for the first time, width measurements based on high resolution and high signal to noise ratio CCD spectra and absolute visual magnitudes from the Hipparcos database.