Spanish Internet Vocabulary: 5 Essential Terms

A few decades ago it didn’t exist, but today the internet is part of everyday life. You are reading this thanks to it. Because the technology changes so quickly, Spanish has had to keep up with new words to talk about it. Here are five useful terms.

Navegador (browser)

Chrome, Firefox, Opera: you are using one right now to read this page. People often just say the name of the one they use, but “navegador” is the general word.

Buscador (search engine)

Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo: the websites that give us search results are “buscadores”. In Spanish we only use this word.

Nube (cloud)

When we save our data outside our device, we save it in “la nube”. The word is a direct translation from English, but in Spain we only use the Spanish version.

Troyano (Trojan)

A type of virus that installs itself secretly on your device. Like the soldiers hidden in the Trojan horse, it hides there and steals your data.

Wifi

The name is written the same in almost every language, but the pronunciation is different. Nobody in Spain will understand the English pronunciation: in Spain we say “güifi”.

Many internet words come from English: see how Spanish has adapted others in our Spanish video game vocabulary and our article on English words in Spanish.

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