What does “echar la culpa” mean in Spanish?

Echar means “to throw,” and culpa means “blame” — put together, echar la culpa is simply the everyday way Spanish speakers say “to blame,” even though English doesn’t phrase it as throwing anything. In this clip, a kid who just broke their mom’s favorite vase decides in real time: le voy a echar la culpa al perro — “I’m going to blame it on the dog,” the dog catching the blame being “thrown.”

The preposition matters: it’s always echarle la culpa a alguien, “to throw the blame at someone,” with that a marking exactly who catches it. The same throwing logic shows up across other Spanish idioms — echar de menos (“to miss someone,” literally “to throw as lacking”) — where echar quietly does a lot of idiomatic heavy lifting well beyond its literal “throw.”