Skip to content

cuarentena

quarantine

noun kwah-rren-TEH-nah Rare
Body & Health Medicine

Origin: From Italian quarantina (forty days), the period medieval ports required ships to wait before landing.

Also means

forty-day period

Usage Note

Cuarentena derives from cuarenta (forty) and originally referred to the forty-day isolation period used in medieval plague control. Today it means any period of medical isolation. The related verb is poner en cuarentena, which can also mean to call something into doubt or hold it in suspense.

Examples

"El viajero cumplió la cuarentena en casa."

Natural Translation

The traveller completed quarantine at home.

Free starter pack

Building your Spanish vocabulary?

Get the 100 most common Spanish words as a free PDF — one email, no spam.

Explore Spanish by topic