What does “está nevando” mean in Spanish?
Está nevando y la nieve es fría
A1 Spanish listening practice · Spanish from Spain · Curated for beginners
Está nevando means “it’s snowing,” and the surprise is what’s missing: the “it.” Weather verbs like nevar and llover have no subject at all in Spanish — the language never needed a dummy “it,” so a single word, nieva, is already a complete sentence. These verbs live almost exclusively in the third person, for the simple reason that nobody ever snows.
The clip drills the family in miniature: “Está nevando. Esto es nieve. La nieve es fría.” The noun has famous relatives: una nevada is a snowfall — the same word behind the Sierra Nevada (“snow-covered range”) and the US state named after it. Same pattern for rain: llueve (“it’s raining”), una lluvia (a rainfall).
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Source: wordfreq 3.1.1 (general) · SUBTLEX-ESP 2011 (spoken). Buckets approximate; exact ranks not stored.