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Whiter than white
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 An English white is Spanish blanco and can often be depended upon to behave similarly in both languages: white shoes – zapatos blancos, gato blanco – white cat; a White Christmas – navidades blancas (a Spanish Christmas is shorter than ours but still characteristically plural).
If someone is white - with fear, for instance - this needs to be translated as a temporary estar blanco but conveying that a person is ethnically white requires the unchanging ser blanco and un blanco is understood to be a white person.
Blanco springs a minor surprise by also translating as blank, so quedarse en blanco means to go blank: se quedó en blanco - he went blank and un cheque en blanco is what we covet but seldom receive: a blank cheque. On the other hand, una página en blanco is the student’s or writer’s nightmare, a blank page, while a una noche en blanco is the insomniac’s nightmare - pesadilla - and is a sleepless night.
Green changes to white for green grapes - uvas blancas - but una marca blanca is that modern staple, a supermarket chain’s own label. As well as being the feminine version of blanco, blanca takes on another role in estar sin blanca – to be broke, have no money, una blanca being a silver coin, long forgotten except in these circumstances.
And when is blanco neither white nor blank? When it’s a target, of course. The type that is set both personally or by officialdom is una meta, which is also the finishing line or post in a race, as well as the goal mouth in football.
Although el blanco del ojo is the white of the eye, an egg white is usually described as la clara de huevo and white coffee is café con leche; ambitiously, white sauce is translated as béchamel even when not up to Cordon Bleu standards.
A white hair is una cana and a person who is white-haired is described as canoso.
As you would expect, the verb blanquear means to whiten, bleach or whitewash, although this does not apply to political whitewashing, which is closer to encubrir.
Nevertheless, blanquear does have unsavoury and none-too-clean associations when it signifies to launder money. |  Return to Top
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