Spanish Word of the Day Archive
Monday October 27, 2008

quemar, verb:
to burn

As we’ve seen in an earlier Spanish Word of the Day, you can use quemar with a grammatical object to mean to burn:

Un incendio quemó todo el bosque.
A fire burned the entire forest.

The past participle is often used to refer to sunburn:

Tenía el rostro quemado por el sol.
He had a sunburned face.

The meaning of the reflexive quemarse depends on where you are in the Hispanic world. In Spain it means to get burned by the sun:

Ponte esto para que no te quemes*.
Put this on so you don’t get sunburn.

But in Latin America, it just means to tan:

Luisa se quema muy rápido.
Luisa gets a tan very quickly.

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Spanish Word of the Day ArchiveMonday October 27, 2008