chico

What it means

1. 1.

   A vocative particle dropped into speech to soften, appeal or mildly remonstrate — roughly 'mate', 'love' or 'come on now'. The feminine chica works the same way.

2. 2.

   Crucially, it carries no information about age: Cubans address pensioners as chico. A foreigner who assumes it means 'kid' will misread the tone of a great many exchanges.

3. 3.

   In the negative, oye chico or pero chico marks polite disagreement: hold on, that's not right.

Examples with translations

• Oye chico, no te pongas así.

  Come on now, don't be like that.

• Pero chica, si yo te lo dije ayer.

  But look, I told you yesterday.

• Chico, dame un momentico.

  Give me a second, would you.

  Note: Said to anyone at all, including someone thirty years older than the speaker.

Where it comes from

Standard Spanish chico, 'small, boy', grammaticalised in Cuban speech into a discourse marker with no lexical content left. The same process produced tío in Spain and güey in Mexico, but chico went further: it lost its age restriction entirely, which the others did not.

Other forms

Similar terms:

mi hermano, mi vida, mima