Does “quitar” mean “to quit” in Spanish?
Mi hermanita me quitó el helado
A1 Spanish listening practice · Colombian Spanish · Curated for beginners
Quitar looks like the English “quit,” but it means the opposite kind of action: to take something away, remove it, or take it off. Mi hermanita me quitó el helado is “my little sister took my ice cream away” — she didn’t quit anything, she grabbed it. The same verb covers taking off a jacket (quitarse la chaqueta) or getting rid of a stain or a headache.
Oddly, quitar and quit share the same Latin root, quietus (“at rest”), but the two languages pulled the meaning in different directions: English kept the sense of stopping or leaving, Spanish kept the sense of clearing something away. If you actually want to say “quit” in Spanish, reach for dejar, dejar de (+ infinitive), or renunciar (to a job) instead.
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Source: wordfreq 3.1.1 (general) · SUBTLEX-ESP 2011 (spoken). Buckets approximate; exact ranks not stored.