Family members in Spanish: mamá to suegra

The family members in Spanish are la madre (mother), el padre (father), el hermano (brother), la hermana (sister), el hijo (son), la hija (daughter), el abuelo (grandfather), la abuela (grandmother), el tío (uncle), la tía (aunt) and el primo, la prima (cousin). Mum and dad, or mom and dad, are mamá and papá, and the family is la familia. One rule does a lot of work: the masculine plural covers a mixed group, so los padres is "parents", los hermanos "brothers and sisters" and los tíos "aunts and uncles". Below are the words, how to say them, the in-laws and step-family, and which family words Spanish films say most.

Updated 28 October 2026 · 10 min read

Family members in Spanish

The h of hermano and hijo is silent, and the j of hijo is a breathy sound from the throat, like the ch of Scottish "loch". The counts are from film and television subtitles, singular and feminine plural together; how they were made, and what they cannot tell apart, is further down.

The masculine plural covers everyone

Spanish nouns for people have a masculine and a feminine form, and when a group is mixed, the masculine plural names it, however many women are in it. The Academy's guide to usage, the Diccionario panhispánico de dudas, calls the masculine the unmarked form for exactly this reason: los alumnos can be a class of boys or a mixed class, while las alumnas can only be girls. For the family that gives:

• los padres: "parents", and also "fathers";
• los hermanos: "brothers and sisters", and also "brothers": ¿Tienes hermanos?, "Do you have any brothers or sisters?";
• los hijos: "children", meaning sons and daughters, and also "sons";
• los abuelos: "grandparents";
• los tíos: "aunts and uncles"; the Academy's dictionary defines the plural as an uncle or aunt and their spouse;
• los suegros: "parents-in-law"; los padrinos: "godparents".

Las hermanas is sisters only, and las hijas daughters only. The dictionary also gives los papás, from papá, as a colloquial word for parents.

Mamá or madre?

Madre and padre are "mother" and "father"; mamá and papá are "mum" and "dad", which the Academy's dictionary marks as frequent in colloquial use. Both familiar words are stressed on the last syllable and written with an accent, which matters: mama without the accent is first of all the anatomical word for a breast, and papa is the Pope or, as a separate word from Quechua, a potato. The dictionary does list mama and papa as popular forms of mamá and papá, so you will see them, but the accented spellings are the standard ones. More affectionate still are mami and papi.

Padre has more meanings than "father": it is the title of a priest (el padre Juan), and in Mexico, as an adjective, it means "great": ¡Qué padre!, "How cool!". Madre turns up in a long list of set phrases, from ¡mi madre!, which the dictionary gives as an exclamation of surprise, to Mexico's a toda madre, which it marks as vulgar and glosses as "great".

In-laws: suegra, cuñado, yerno, nuera

Cuñado is both your spouse's brother and your sister's husband, and in much of Spanish-speaking America it is also a friendly way to address a friend. Spanish has a word English lacks: consuegros, the parents of your child's husband or wife — each set of parents-in-law is consuegro or consuegra to the other. The subtitles barely use it (0.1 per million). Another way to say "in-law" is the adjective político: the dictionary's own examples are padre político (father-in-law), hermano político (brother-in-law), hijo político (son-in-law) and hija política (daughter-in-law).

Step-family and half-siblings

The dictionary traces padrastro to a Latin form it labels disparaging, built on pater, "father", and its second sense is still "a bad father". Its fourth sense has nothing to do with family at all: a padrastro is also a hangnail.

Medio hermano and hermanastro are often taught as a strict pair: a medio hermano shares one parent with you, and a hermanastro is the child of your step-parent, with no parent in common. That is how the dictionary defines them first. But its second sense of hermanastro is simply "half-brother", so in real use the step word covers both. And plain hermano covers a half-brother too: the dictionary defines it as someone with the same father and mother, "or only one of them". To insist that a brother shares both parents, Spanish says hermano carnal; to say which parent, hermano de padre or hermano de madre.

Godparents and compadres

El padrino and la madrina are the godfather and godmother at a baptism, and also the sponsors who accompany someone at any Christian sacrament, a wedding included. The relationship runs sideways too: your child's godfather is your compadre, and so is the father of your godchild; the godmother and the mother are each other's comadre. The dictionary calls the bond between parents and godparents compadrazgo. Like cuñado, compadre has spread to friendship, and is used colloquially for a friend, mostly when addressing him. El padrino is also a Mafia boss, which is why The Godfather is called El padrino in Spanish.

Regional words

Two Mexican words are worth recognising, both recorded in the Spanish academies' Diccionario de americanismos: jefe and jefa, "boss", are used for a parent in Mexico, Nicaragua and Bolivia, and carnal is "brother" or "sister" in Mexico, as well as a very close friend. The Academy's dictionary also lists viejo and vieja, "old man" and "old woman", among its synonyms for father and mother. Tío and tía have a well-known second life in Spain as "guy" and "woman", "mate" — the counts for that are in regional Spanish slang.

Mi madre, mis padres: possessives

The word for "my" agrees with the thing owned, not with the owner: mi madre, "my mother", but mis padres, "my parents". The same goes for tu and tus ("your", to one person you call tú) and su and sus. Su is the awkward one: su padre can be his father, her father, their father, or your father when you are speaking to someone as usted — the polite "you" that formal and informal you counts against tú.

• Tengo un hermano y dos hermanas. — I have one brother and two sisters.
• Mi madre se llama Ana. — My mother is called Ana.
• ¿Cuántos años tiene tu padre? — How old is your father?
• Mis abuelos viven en Sevilla. — My grandparents live in Seville.
• ¿Tienes hijos? — Do you have children?

Two surnames: one from each parent

In Spain a person carries two surnames: traditionally the father's first surname, then the mother's first surname, and neither changes on marriage. So a child of Juan García López and María Pérez Ruiz is a García Pérez. A law of 1999 let parents agree to put the mother's surname first, but if they did not choose, the father's still came first. Since 30 June 2017 Spain's Civil Registry law has no default: parents agree the order before registering the birth, and if they cannot agree, the registrar decides "in the best interest of the child". Whatever order the first child gets, the brothers and sisters who follow get the same.

Which family words do Spanish films say most?

We counted each family word in Spanish film and television subtitles. Each row is one word: feminine plurals are added to their singular, but hijos, padres, hermanos, tíos and abuelos are rows of their own, because each also names a mixed group. Only the accented mamá, papá, tío and tía are counted.

Padre is first, at 829.3 times per million words, but it is a ceiling: priests are padre too, and so is everything "cool" in Mexico. Madre is second at 665.4, and hijo third. On screen, Spanish says "mother" more than "mum": mamá is at 585.2, and even with mami (40.2) it stays behind madre. The diminutives are rare: mamita 3.1, abuelita 6.2. They are not in the table.

Hijo is said twice as often as hija, though hijo is also an affectionate "dear" to anyone. Marido is nearly twice as common as esposo, while mujer, "woman" and also "wife", is said 589.7 times per million, about twice as often as esposa: how many of those are wives a word count cannot say. Tío comes ninth, far above tía, because it is also "guy". Of the in-laws, cuñado is said most, and of the step-family, padrastro — though some of those are hangnails. Compadre, at 4.2, is far more common than comadre, at 0.3.

A single-word count cannot see phrases, so medio hermano is not in the table, and it cannot tell padres the parents from padres the priests. Spellings without the accent are left out: tio without its accent adds 20.9 per million that may be uncles or guys, and papa, at 51.3, is shared with the Pope and the potato.

Learn them in context

The family words are taught early in the free Spanish course, Verbavia (our own course), with a recording of each. None of them makes the 100 most common Spanish words, which are almost all grammar. Other everyday sets: numbers 1 to 100 in Spanish and the days of the week in Spanish. The same family words in other languages: Italian, Portuguese, German and French.

Sources

• Real Academia Española, Diccionario de la lengua española: padre, madre, mamá, papá, mama, papa, mami, hijo, hermano, hermanastro, tío, abuelo, primo, suegro, consuegro, cuñado, yerno, nuera, político, padrastro, madrastra, hijastro, padrino, madrina, compadre, comadre and compadrazgo.
• RAE and ASALE, Diccionario panhispánico de dudas: género, section 2.1, on the masculine used for mixed groups.
• ASALE, Diccionario de americanismos: jefe and carnal.
• Boletín Oficial del Estado: Ley 40/1999, on the order of surnames, and Ley 20/2011 del Registro Civil, article 49.2, in force from 30 June 2017.
• Wikipedia (Spanish): El padrino, for the film's Spanish title.
• Wikipedia: Spanish naming customs, on the two surnames and marriage, and Spanish determiners, on mi, mis and su.
• The counts are from OpenSubtitles 2018 (Lison, P. & Tiedemann, J., 2016, aclanthology.org) through Hermit Dave's FrequencyWords lists, content licensed CC BY-SA 4.0, github.com. They are computed by scripts/frequency_thousand.py and printed from its output rather than typed.