What does “sofreír” mean in Spanish?

Sofreír means to fry gently — cooking onions or garlic low and slow until soft, not crisp. It’s built from freír (“to fry”) plus the prefix so-, a worn-down form of the Latin sub (“under, lightly”), which is why the result is a light fry rather than a hard one. A cook slow-cooking onion, celery, and tomato paste for a Portuguese bifana sauce says exactly this: sofreímos bien esto — “we sauté this well.”

The same so- prefix quietly turns up elsewhere: sonreír (to smile — literally “to laugh a little,” from reír), sobrasar (to roast lightly), and sopesar (to weigh something in the hand before deciding). Once you spot the pattern, so- is a reliable signal for “a lighter version of the base verb.”