extrañar
verbCEFR B1
What does “extrañar” mean in English?
to miss
to miss (a person, place, or thing that is absent); transitive; personal a obligatory before human objects; Latin American Spanish (peninsular equivalent: echar de menos); dialect-tagged
Example sentences
Extraño muchísimo a mis amigos desde que me vine a vivir acá — allá se quedaron todos y aquí estoy construyendo todo desde cero.
I miss my friends so much since I came to live here — they all stayed there and here I am building everything from scratch.
¿No extrañas la comida de tu país? Porque yo llevo dos meses fuera y ya no aguanto más sin unos tacos de verdad.
Don't you miss the food from your country? Because I have been away for two months and I can't take it any longer without proper tacos.
Mi abuela siempre decía que lo que más extrañaba de su pueblo era el olor del campo por las mañanas, que no existe en ningún otro lugar del mundo.
My grandmother always said that what she missed most about her village was the smell of the countryside in the mornings, which doesn't exist anywhere else in the world.
How to use it
Extrañar means 'to miss (a person, place, or thing)' and is the standard Latin American Spanish form for this meaning. In most of Latin America (Mexico, Colombia, Argentina, etc.), extrañar is the default verb and echar de menos sounds bookish or foreign. In Spain, echar de menos is the norm and extrañar is understood but marked. Both verbs are transitive: extrañar a alguien (personal a obligatory before human objects). Extrañar has a second meaning in peninsular contexts — 'to find strange / to be surprised by' — but in most Latin American contexts only the 'miss' meaning is active.
Common mistake
Extrañar is the dominant Latin American form for 'to miss'. In Spain, echar de menos is the norm. Using echar de menos in a Latin American context is understood but may sound foreign; extrañar in Spain can mean 'to find strange'. The personal a is obligatory before human objects in both dialects: 'extraño a mi familia', never '*extraño mi familia'.