The following words and phrases didn’t make it to our top 10 list here, but you will also hear them in Colombia and certainly not in a formal Spanish class.

Every country has a flag, food and symbols that identify them. But what about a single word? During the 6th International Congress of the Spanish Language (VI Congreso Internacional de la Lengua Española) celebrated in Panama, the blog Papeles Perdidos, created by the newspaper El País, published an atlas of the representative words of Spanish-speaking […]

This was an interesting word-find for me. I had never heard of chontaduro or salmuera until I ran across this jar of preserved fruit. Good think the jar itself offered translations. Problem is, I don’t know what a “palm fruit” is in English either. Hopefully I can taste one soon. As for salmuera, which means […]

I ran across this in a recent business meeting. I had never heard the word BREVAS before so fortunately the jar of food had the English translation of “figs”. The more general word for FIGS is higos. Curiously though, in Colombia they do not understand the word higos. I’m sure there’s some interesting history there. […]

One of the particularities you can get in the slang of a country is the phenomenon of creating new words by inverting or changing the order of the original. These new inverted words keep the same meaning as the original one. Argentina was the first country where Jared identified 24 inverted words and dedicated a […]