Spanish greetings: from hola to hasta luego

The most common Spanish greetings are hola (hello), buenos días (good morning), buenas tardes (good afternoon), buenas noches (good evening, good night), ¿qué tal? (how's it going?), ¿cómo estás? (how are you?) and, for goodbye, adiós, hasta luego and nos vemos. Those are the greetings in Spanish a learner needs first, and hola is the one that does most of the work: in Spanish film and television dialogue it is said 4.4 times as often as adiós. Most Spanish greetings are two or three words long, which single-word counts cannot see, so for this page we counted the whole phrases. Below are the greetings with how to say them and when, the ranking, and the ones you will only hear in some countries.

Updated 4 November 2026 · 8 min read

The greetings in Spanish

The h of hola and hasta is silent, and b and v sound the same, so bienvenido and nos vemos both have a soft b.

Hola, buenos días or buenas tardes?

Hola never goes wrong: Spanish uses it with friends, strangers, shop staff and the boss, at any time of day. The three time-of-day greetings are a little more polite and are often added to it: ¡Hola, buenos días!

• Buenos días is for the morning, roughly until lunch.
• Buenas tardes takes over from lunch. A Spanish tarde runs on into the early evening, so it covers more of the day than English "afternoon".
• Buenas noches is for after dark, both as "good evening" when you arrive and as "good night" when you leave or go to bed.

On their own, ¡Buenas! is a casual way to say any of the three.

Where the choice really matters is ¿cómo estás? against ¿cómo está?. The first is for someone you call tú, the second for someone you call usted, and it is the one choice on this page that depends on who you are talking to. Which "you" to use with whom is its own question, answered with counts in formal and informal you.

Which Spanish greetings do films say most?

Single-word frequency lists, like the one behind hello and goodbye, ranked, cannot count buenos días or hasta luego: días and luego are mostly something else. So we read the whole Spanish release of OpenSubtitles 2018, 213,508,602 lines of film and television subtitles, counted every greeting as a phrase, and removed the repeated uploads of the same film (method below the table).

What the counts show:

• Hello beats goodbye by far. Hola is said 4.4 times as often as adiós, the commonest goodbye, and adiós in turn 3.4 times as often as nos vemos.
• Night beats morning. Buenas noches is ahead of buenos días, by 1.19 to one, partly because it does two jobs, hello and goodnight. Buenas tardes trails both: buenos días is said 4.5 times as often.
• Nos vemos is the everyday see-you. It is said 2.5 times as often as hasta luego.
• Tú wins on screen. ¿Cómo estás? is said 2.3 times as often as the formal ¿cómo está?.
• ¿Qué tal? has a second job. Besides the greeting, it starts suggestions: ¿qué tal si vamos al cine?, "how about we go to the cinema?". That use turned up 23,326 times, and it is left out of the table.

Some phrases are only greetings in certain places in a sentence, so the last column says what was counted. Nos vemos is also "we look" (nos vemos bien, "we look good"), so it is counted only before the end of the sentence, a time or a place. Mucho gusto is counted only where it opens a sentence, because con mucho gusto is "with pleasure". Encantado still includes some "delighted", as in encantado de ayudar, "happy to help", so its count is a ceiling.

Greetings you will only hear in some countries

Spanish is spoken in about twenty countries, and a few greetings belong to some of them.

• Buen día is "good morning" in Argentina and Uruguay. It accounts for 25% of all the good-mornings in the table, counted only where it opens a sentence, so un buen día ("one fine day") is left out.
• ¿Cómo andas?, literally "how are you walking?", is the River Plate "how's it going?", and it is rare on screen.
• ¿Qué onda? is a casual "what's up?" in Mexico, Central America and the Southern Cone. Films barely use it: 981 times, against 44,840 for ¿qué tal?.
• Chao (or chau) is a colloquial "bye", the Italian ciao respelt.

Answering a greeting

• Hola, ¿qué tal? — Hi, how's it going?
• Bien, gracias, ¿y tú? — Fine, thanks, and you?
• Muy bien. — Very well.
• Más o menos. — So-so.
• Mucho gusto. — Nice to meet you. Igualmente. — Likewise.
• ¡Hasta mañana! — See you tomorrow!

Gracias itself is counted against the thank-yous of other languages in which language says thank you most.

Where hola and adiós come from

Adiós is a Dios, "to God": a blessing on someone leaving, the same compound as French adieu, Italian addio and Portuguese adeus. Hola is less certain. Wiktionary gives it as probably from French holà, a call of "hey, stop!", related to old Germanic shouts for hailing a ferryman. Hasta luego is simply "until later", the same idea as Portuguese até logo.

Learn them in a sentence

Greetings are the first lesson of the free Spanish course, Verbavia (our own course), with a recording of each. Hola is the 88th most common word in Spanish dialogue, though the top of that list is mostly grammar, as the most common Spanish words shows. The rest of the beginner sets are counted the same way: colors in Spanish, numbers 1 to 100 in Spanish, family members in Spanish and the days of the week. The same greetings in other languages: greetings in Italian, greetings in Portuguese and greetings in German.

The season's own greetings, ¡Feliz Navidad! and ¡Feliz año nuevo!, have pages of their own: Merry Christmas in Spanish and Happy New Year in Spanish.

The same phrase count in two more languages: greetings in French and Chinese greetings.

Sources

• The counts are from the OPUS release of OpenSubtitles 2018, Spanish (Lison, P. & Tiedemann, J., 2016, aclanthology.org; the file is es.txt.gz at opus.nlpl.eu). It was read once, line by line. Each phrase was matched as whole words, and a line holding a greeting was counted only the first time it appeared together with the two lines before and after it, which removes the duplicate uploads of the same film. Spain and Latin America are mixed in one release with no country label, and many subtitles are translations, so the counts describe Spanish on screen rather than any one country. The method and every rule are in scripts/frequency_greetings_es.py; the counts are committed in research/greetings-es-counts/ and printed from there rather than typed.
• Wiktionary: buen día, qué onda, cómo andas, chao, qué tal, adiós and hola, for the regions, meanings and origins.