W is for… Um, there are no words that start with the letter “W” in Spanish.

I wracked my brain to find a Spanish word starting with the letter “W” for this post. I even filtered through the Wordreference.com dictionary and forums, but couldn’t find anything that really felt truly Spanish.

I decided to go to the definitive Spanish language source, the Real Academia Española, to see what was up with the letter W. One simple search for “W” gave me the explanation I was looking for…

There are no purely Spanish words that start with the letter W. Any word in the Spanish dictionary that does start with the letter W has been imported from another language.

This makes sense why some words in Perú were spelled with “hua” or a “w” interchangeably. For example, huanca or wanka. Huanca would have originally been from Quechua.

p.s. Scott wanted me to do this post on Wi-Fi, and finally admit to the world how addicted I am to the internets. As if you already didn’t know! The search for open Wi-Fi internet access has been a major theme for us in Perú, though. Wi-Fi is also called “inalámbrico”, which means “cordless”, but can also imply a “cordless telephone”. It gets confusing and is better just to go with the imported word Wi-Fi.