Spanish Word of the Day: cutre

This weekend, a reader from Greece asked me to explain the word cutre. I can’t blame him: most bilingual dictionaries don’t even have it in them, and Spanish-English dictionaries don’t really give the meaning. No wonder; it’s pretty much a colloquial word.

If I look in a random monolingual dictionary, I see the following definitions: “poor”, “dirty”, “of low quality”, “miser” or “miserable”. Funny thing is that one of my dictionaries says that it can also mean lujoso or generoso; pretty weird if you consider the earlier mentioned definitions.

*Grammatical note: Cutre can be both an adjective and a noun. When a noun the gender depends on the gender of the person.

Sentences

Le llevó a un bar cutre después de una película aún más cutre.
He took her to a cheap bar, after watching an even cheaper movie.

Nunca vivirá bien porque es una cutre.
He’s never going to live good because he’s a miserable piece of human.

Eres un cutre, jamás invitas a una ronda.
You’re a miser, you never give away a round.