What does “hasta el cansancio” mean in Spanish?
Negociaciones entre la Casa Blanca e Irán y sus desafíos
B2 Spanish listening practice · Spanish from Spain · Picked for people who know more
Hasta el cansancio means doing something repeatedly until everyone is sick of it — “over and over,” “ad nauseam,” “till you’re blue in the face.” It attaches to a verb of saying or doing: repetir / decir / insistir hasta el cansancio. The literal image, “all the way to tiredness,” carries the exasperation: not just often, but so often it wears people out. A crisp upgrade over plain muchas veces.
The diplomat says the president has repeated a point “hasta el cansancio” — hammered it home relentlessly. It implies the repetition is excessive or wearying, so it often carries a faint edge of complaint. Compare the close cousin hasta la saciedad (Spain, “until satiety”) and the blunter una y otra vez (“again and again”); hasta el cansancio adds the specific flavor of weariness from all that repeating.
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Source: wordfreq 3.1.1 (general) · SUBTLEX-ESP 2011 (spoken). These numbers are close, not perfect.