Todo (Spanish for “all; everything”) comes from the Latin for the same, totus. From that same Latin root, we also get the English… total. Anything that’s total is really all-encompassing, right? Hannah Arendt would certainly say that about a totalitarian government!

We can see the t-d to t-t mapping very clearly!

Alegre, Spanish for happiness, has a close English cousin in alacrity (an SAT word meaning “eagerness” or “cheerful readiness”).

Both come from the Latin alacritas meaning the same as the English.

It’s funny, to me at least, how the word for eagerness turned into the word for happy in Spanish: there is a strong and ancient correlation between being willing to do things, and excited about them — and being happy.

Crudo is Spanish for “raw,” particularly in the everyday sense of “uncooked food”.

From the Latin crudus, meaning the same (raw, bloody), we get various English words including:

• Cruel — makes sense if we think of it in the sense of “bloody”: a cruel person is someone who makes someone else bleed, at least emotionally.
• Crude, as in Crude Oil — today crude is most commonly used in the phrase crude oil, but if we remember that crude oil is oil that is not yet processed, then the parallel to “raw” is obvious.

All still contain the cr- prefix, and crude still has the following -d- as well.

Interestingly, the Latin crudus itself comes from the Indo-European *kreue also meaning “raw”, from which — with the initial k- sound lost — we get the word raw itself. Thus, even raw itself is related to crudo.

This is one of my all-time favorite Spanish-English parallel etymologies.

The Spanish word desayuno, meaning breakfast, comes from the prefix des– meaning not– and ayuno, meaning fast (in the sense of a religious fast, during which you don’t eat). Thus, literally desayuno (breakfast) is “the break – fast”!

The Spanish ladrón, for thief, sounds unrelated to any English word.

But, it does have an interesting connection to the English for the same, Burglar.

Burglar comes from the Latin burgus, which meant “castle” or a “fortified town” — think about the -burg ending in many place names, like Pittsburgh or Edinborough.

But, if burglar comes from burgus, then where did the -l- in the middle come from?

Well, the -l- was inserted slowly over time under the influence of the Latin for thief, latro. The word for “thief” was, unconsciously, made to sound similar to the other word for thief! And from latro we get, directly, the Spanish ladrón.

Thus, although burglar isn’t directly descended from ladrón, they are incestuous cousins.