Spanish words used in English, and how Spanish uses them

Much of the Spanish in English came by way of the Americas: from ranching and the frontier (rodeo, patio, plaza), from food (salsa, tortilla), from politics and war (junta, guerrilla, embargo), and from everyday talk heard across a long border (amigo, nada, loco). Because of that history, many of these words came into English with one narrow meaning — a cowboy show, a shop, a coup — that is not the one a Spanish speaker has in mind. We measured how often Spanish speakers actually say each of them, and checked what each one means at home.

Updated 7 October 2026 · 6 min read

The words, ranked by how often Spanish speakers use them

The rank is each word's place in 423 million words of Spanish film and television dialogue (OpenSubtitles 2018), where rank 1 is the most common word. The second rank column is where the word falls in our own list of the most common Spanish words, which runs to 18,348 entries.

The Spanish meanings come from each word's Spanish entry in Wiktionary. Where a word's commonest use in Spanish is inside a fixed phrase, the rank counts the word, not the phrase.

Everyday Spanish

11 of the thirty are among the thousand most common words of spoken Spanish, and the top of the table is made of words English uses as slang.

• Nada is word number 58: it is simply "nothing", and it turns up in de nada ("you're welcome") and no pasa nada ("it's fine").
• Hombre is "man", but it is also an exclamation — ¡hombre! — used for surprise, emphasis or friendly protest.
• Mañana means "tomorrow", and also "morning": mañana por la mañana is "tomorrow morning". The English sense, some vague time that may never come, is not what a Spanish speaker means by it: mañana is a definite day.
• Pronto is above all "soon", not "at once": hasta pronto is "see you soon", and de pronto means "suddenly".

Common in Spanish, narrow in English

The middle of the table holds ordinary Spanish words that English borrowed for one special use.

• Embargo ranks 885, far higher than a word about trade bans should, because Spanish uses it constantly in sin embargo, "however". Its own meaning is a legal seizure of goods, and the trade ban as well.
• Cargo in Spanish is a post or a responsibility: el cargo de director, and a cargo de, "in charge of". Goods carried on a ship are usually carga.
• Mesa is a table — the flat-topped hill of the American West is named after one.
• Plaza is a town square, but also a seat or a place (una plaza de aparcamiento, a parking space) and a job opening.
• Pueblo is any village or town, and also "a people": el pueblo is the nation or the common people.
• Patio is the courtyard at the centre of a house, and, in Spain, the school playground.

Words English uses more than Spanish does

At the far end, 7 of the thirty rank below 10,000 in Spanish dialogue. They are real Spanish words, but the ones English fixed on are specialised ones.

• Bonanza is at rank 38,856. In Spanish it is first of all calm weather at sea, and only by extension prosperity.
• Matador is at 21,320. The word means "killer", and in bullfighting the one who kills the bull; the bullfighter in general is a torero.
• Guerrilla (25,028) is the force or the war, "little war" in origin. A single fighter is a guerrillero, a distinction English lost.
• Tortilla (12,685) depends on where you are: in Mexico it is the flatbread; in Spain a tortilla is an omelette, most often the potato one.

Meanings that moved

• Vigilante in Spanish is a watchman or security guard — a job, not a crime — and as an adjective simply "watchful".
• Bodega is a wine cellar, a winery or a storeroom. The corner shop is the sense it took on in New York.
• Junta is any board, council or meeting: a junta de vecinos is a residents' association. The military government is one special case.
• Sombrero is any hat at all.
• Salsa is any sauce, gravy included; the music and the dance are later meanings.
• Macho is the ordinary word for a male animal. The swagger is only one of its uses.
• Rodeo is first a detour, a roundabout way — sin rodeos is "without beating about the bush" — and only then the round-up of cattle.

Why this matters for a learner

The words at the top of the table are a genuine head start: nada, hombre, mañana, amigo and pronto are all among the few hundred commonest words in Spanish, and you already know roughly where they go. The rest are a lesson in how borrowing works. English took each word at one moment, for one use, and kept that use; Spanish kept the whole word. Let the Spanish meaning replace the English one, and the words you think you know become words you actually know.

The 1,000 most common Spanish words are free, in frequency order, and downloadable as a printable PDF or a CSV for Excel or Anki, and the Spanish course teaches them in that order. The same exercise for French is French words used in English, and the Spanish words English has not borrowed — sobremesa and estrenar — are in words that don't exist in English. How hard the rest of Spanish is, verbs included, is in is Spanish hard to learn.

Sources

• 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 ranks are computed by scripts/frequency_curves.py; the word list and every meaning in it are written by hand in scripts/frequency_extras.py.
• Wiktionary, Spanish entries: embargo, cargo, plaza, pueblo, patio, bonanza, matador, guerrilla, tortilla, vigilante, bodega, junta, sombrero, salsa, macho, rodeo.