Happy Halloween in other languages

Happy Halloween in other languages is mostly the word Halloween with the local "happy" in front of it: Feliz Halloween in Spanish and Portuguese, Joyeux Halloween in French, Buon Halloween in Italian and Fröhliches Halloween in German. The festival travelled from the English-speaking world and took its name with it. What each language made its own is "trick or treat". Below are both, with how to say them, a count of how often films mention Halloween in each language, and the words for the Mexican Día de los Muertos, which follows two days later.

Updated 15 October 2026 · 6 min read

Happy Halloween and trick or treat

Three notes on the table:

• None of the trick-or-treat phrases is a word-for-word translation. Each language found its own rhyme or rhythm: Italian made two matching diminutives, German two words beginning with S.
• Portuguese has more than one. Gostosuras ou travessuras ("treats or mischief") is also used.
• Spanish has more than one too. Truco o trato is the best known; dulce o trato ("sweet or deal") is another.

What the other languages call it

Most languages simply say Halloween. Three have a name of their own as well:

• Spanish: Noche de Brujas, "night of witches".
• Portuguese: Dia das Bruxas, "day of the witches".
• Mandarin: 万圣节 (Wànshèngjié), which originally meant All Saints' Day and is now used for Halloween.

The English word is itself a contraction of All Hallows' Eve, the evening before All Saints' Day on 1 November. That day has an old name in each language: Todos los Santos in Spanish, la Toussaint in French, Ognissanti in Italian, Allerheiligen in German and Todos os Santos in Portuguese.

How to say them

• Spanish Feliz Halloween: "feh-LEES". Truco o trato is "TROO-ko o TRAH-to".
• French Joyeux Halloween: "zhwah-YUH"; the x is silent, and the h of Halloween is not pronounced either.
• Italian Buon Halloween: "bwon". Dolcetto o scherzetto is "dol-CHET-to o sker-TSET-to": sch is "sk" in Italian.
• German Fröhliches Halloween: "FRUR-likh-es", with the rounded ö. Süßes oder Saures is "ZUE-ses OH-der ZOW-res": s before a vowel is a z sound.
• Portuguese Feliz Halloween: "feh-LEES". Doces ou travessuras is "DOH-sees oh trah-veh-SOO-ras" in Brazil.

How often do films say "Halloween"?

We counted the word in film and television subtitles in seven languages, with Portuguese counted separately for Brazil and Portugal.

Each figure is how many times the word is said per million words of subtitles. Italian subtitles say it most, at 16.2, and those of Portugal least, at 8.2. The spread is narrow, and for a plain reason: most of these subtitles are translations of the same American films, so the Halloween episodes are the same episodes in every language. The Mandarin figure is for 万圣节.

Halloween is a small festival on screen next to Christmas. English subtitles say Christmas 8.8 times as often as Halloween. The Christmas greetings are in Merry Christmas and Happy New Year in 9 languages.

The Italian trick-or-treat phrase is common enough to be counted: dolcetto is said 6.9 times per million words and scherzetto 6.1, nearly the same figure, which is what you would expect of two words that are almost always said together.

Witch, ghost and pumpkin

In every one of these languages films mention ghosts more than witches, and pumpkins least by a long way. In Spanish subtitles fantasma is said 43.5 times per million words, bruja 30.8 and calabaza 6.0. German Geist scores highest of all, at 69.7, but it also means "mind" and "spirit", so that count is a ceiling. One thing to notice in the table: fantasma ends in -a and is masculine in Spanish, Italian and Portuguese.

Día de los Muertos is not Halloween

The Day of the Dead is celebrated on 1 and 2 November, mainly in Mexico and by people of Mexican heritage elsewhere. It falls right after Halloween and shares some of its imagery, but it is a different festival with a different purpose: families gather to remember relatives who have died. In 2008 UNESCO added it to its list of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.

In Mexico it is usually called Día de Muertos. Día de los Muertos, with the article, is common outside Mexico; both are understood.

There is no set greeting to match "Happy Halloween". People do write Feliz Día de Muertos, and it is understood as a warm wish, but the day is one of remembering more than of greeting.

Learn the language behind the greeting

Verbavia (our own course) teaches 9 languages from the most common words up, a lesson a day, free on the web: Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, German, Mandarin and Esperanto among them. Halloween is always on 31 October, and the dates are easier with the months to hand: Italian, German and Portuguese. Everyday greetings are counted in hello and goodbye, ranked.

Sources

• Wiktionary: the translation tables of trick or treat and Halloween, and the entries truco o trato, Día de Muertos, ofrenda, calavera and cempasúchil.
• Wikipedia: Day of the Dead, for the dates, the customs and the 2008 UNESCO listing.
• Lison, P. & Tiedemann, J. (2016). OpenSubtitles2016: Extracting Large Parallel Corpora from Movie and TV Subtitles. Proceedings of LREC 2016. aclanthology.org
• Dave, H. FrequencyWords: frequency lists from OpenSubtitles 2018, content licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. github.com. The counts are computed by scripts/frequency_thousand.py in Verbavia's repository and printed from its output rather than typed.