What does “echar de menos” mean in Spanish?

Echar de menos is how Spain says “to miss” a person, place, or thing: la echo mucho de menos (“I miss her a lot”). Latin America generally prefers extrañar; in Spain extrañar mostly survives as “to find strange.” The phrase is a fossil of a linguistic accident — and its literal words (“to throw of less”) make no sense precisely because the original verb wasn’t echar at all.

It comes from Old Galician-Portuguese achar de menos (“to find lacking”), where achar means “to find” (Spanish hallar). Spanish speakers misheard achar as the similar-sounding echar (“to throw”), and the spelling stuck — leaving an idiom whose literal reading is nonsense but whose meaning never changed. The clip is a Spanish cooking show: a contestant dedicates his dish to his sister, repeating la echo de menos (“I miss her”).