Today’s Spanish word of the day is “santo”.
It can be an adjective meaning “holy” or “saintly”, or a noun meaning “saint”. As a noun, “santo” is the masculine form referring to male saints, while “santa” is the feminine form referring to female saints.
As you may have noticed, the word is usually abbreviated to “san” when naming male saints, for example “San Francisco” and “San Antonio”. This is an example of a phenomenon called apocope (“apócope” in Spanish), in which the final syllable of the word is omitted. Some other Spanish words that follow this pattern include “alguno”, which becomes “algún” before singular masculine nouns, and “ciento”, which becomes “cien” before a noun or when used as part of another number.
The full word “santo” is used with the saints Domingo, Tomás, Tomé and Toribio in order to avoid confusion in speech. If the shortened “san” form was used, these names might sound like “Santo Mingo”, “Santo Más”, “Santo Mé” and “Santo Ribio” respectively.
The word “santo” comes from Latin sanctus (“holy”), which is also the root of several English words including “saint”, “sanctuary”, “sanctity”.
Example sentences
Ella le rezó a su santo favorito.
She prayed to her favorite saint.
¡Santo cielo! No esperaba verte aquí.
Good heavens! I didn’t expect to see you here.
En muchas ciudades de Latinoamérica, hay procesiones en honor a los santos durante la Semana Santa.
In many cities in Latin America, there are processions in honor of the saints during Holy Week.
La fiesta de San Fermín en Pamplona es famosa por los encierros.
The San Fermín festival in Pamplona is famous for the running of the bulls.
El papa canonizó a un nuevo santo.
The Pope canonized a new saint.
