"Gásfiter", "cotufa" and "escortei": the words that Spanish has adapted (or deformed) from English

In the middle of one of those routine zoom meetings with my BBC colleagues, someone knocked on my door.

"I have to go open up the plumber," I told them.

To my surprise, the only one who understood me was my boss, who, like me, is Chilean.

The rest of them asked themselves the same question that you are probably asking yourself: what the hell does plumber mean?

He is a plumber, as they say in Spain, Mexico and other countries; a person whose trade is to repair plumbing or sanitary fixtures.

But where does this curious word come from?

From "gas fitter", which in English means a gas fittings fitter but is also used to describe a person who fixes pipes.

As well as gasfiter, there are many other words that Spanish took from English and adapted (or deformed) according to their culture.

They are not necessarily anglicisms (as are, for example, "cool", "closet", "clip", "link" or "mouse", English words used by Spanish-speakers today) but are expressions that spontaneously They were taken by the different societies that speak Spanish and distorted according to their pronunciation, most of the time regardless of how they are written in the original language.

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The ubiquitous English has influenced thousands of languages ​​around the world, but the proximity of Latin America to the United States makes this even more evident here.

"It is a very normal phenomenon, when the speakers of a language want to bring a word from another language, the most common thing is that the pronunciation, and then its writing, adapts to the target language, following its molds", explains to BBC Mundo Carlos González Vergara, Chilean linguist and expert in Spanish morphology and syntax.

"And it happens with all languages. Japanese, for example, also adapted English words, they call the typewriter Tappurait?, which comes from tap writer," he adds.

For Fernando Zúñiga, an expert in linguistic typology and Indo-American languages, there are different types of loanwords and in some cases, the meaning can even change from the original language to the target language.

"The loans come from a contact between two languages ​​that is often deep and prolonged. And it requires that there be a certain bilingualism, a certain part of the population that knows both languages," he says.

"But when there is not widespread bilingualism, these things occur a lot, like the word plumber or others, that people take them, adapt the pronunciation and can even change the meaning because they don't really know the original," he adds .

Among all the BBC Mundo journalists, from different Spanish-speaking countries, we compiled some of the most illustrative words of this phenomenon.

Many of them are not included in the Royal Spanish Academy nor do they have a solid theory that supports their supposed origin, but popular belief can help us decipher that mystery.

Here is a list of these very particular words. Can you think of any more?