Spanish Exclamations

English builds an exclamation with how and what a: "how lovely!", "what a day!". Spanish uses a small closed set of frames headed by qué, cuánto, cómo and vaya, each wrapped in the double punctuation ¡...! - an inverted mark at the start and a plain one at the end. Once you know the handful of frames, you can exclaim about almost anything.

Running through all of them is one spelling rule. The exclamative words qué, cuánto, cómo and quién carry a written accent, exactly as they do in questions, and lose it when they act as plain relatives or conjunctions. The accent is what tells a reader the word is doing the exclaiming.

The frames at a glance

qué: the workhorse

Qué heads most Spanish exclamations, and what follows it decides the meaning.

Qué + adjective or adverb = How...!

• ¡Qué bonito! (How lovely!)
• ¡Qué bien! (How good! / Great!)
• ¡Qué raro! (How strange!)
• ¡Qué rápido! (How fast!)

Qué + noun = What (a)...! Note that Spanish inserts no article - there is no word for the English "a".

• ¡Qué sorpresa! (What a surprise!)
• ¡Qué día! (What a day!)
• ¡Qué frío! (How cold it is! - literally "what cold!")

To intensify the noun with an adjective, slot tan or más between the noun and the adjective. Both mean the same thing here; más is very slightly more emphatic.

• ¡Qué casa tan grande! (What a big house!)
• ¡Qué idea más buena! (What a great idea!)
• ¡Qué día tan largo! (What a long day!)

A common beginner slip is to reach for muy in this frame. It does not belong: you cannot say "¡Qué casa muy grande!". The intensifier is tan or más, and it sits before the adjective, not before the noun.

cuánto: what a lot

Cuánto exclaims about quantity, and it agrees like an ordinary adjective when it sits in front of a noun.

• ¡Cuánta gente! (What a lot of people! - feminine, agreeing with gente)
• ¡Cuántos libros tienes! (What a lot of books you have! - masculine plural)
• ¡Cuánto dinero! (What a lot of money!)

Before a verb, cuánto stays invariable and means "how much":

• ¡Cuánto has crecido! (How much you've grown!)
• ¡Cuánto te quiero! (How much I love you!)
• ¡Cuánto llovió anoche! (How it rained last night!)

cómo: how it happens

Cómo + verb exclaims about the manner or intensity of an action. English often renders it with "how" plus the verb.

• ¡Cómo llueve! (How it's raining!)
• ¡Cómo corre! (How he runs! / Look at him go!)
• ¡Cómo has cambiado! (How you've changed!)

Keep cómo apart from como without the accent, which means "as", "like" or "since": lo hago como quiero (I do it how I like). The accent is the whole difference.

vaya: what a..., usually with a sigh

Vaya + noun is a ready-made "what a...", and it very often carries irony or mild annoyance. Literally it is the present subjunctive of ir, but in this frame it has frozen solid and does not conjugate.

• ¡Vaya día! (What a day! - and not a good one)
• ¡Vaya lío! (What a mess!)
• ¡Vaya coche! (What a car! - awed, or sarcastic, depending on tone)

It overlaps with qué + noun, but adds attitude. ¡Qué coche! can be plain admiration; ¡Vaya coche! usually means either genuine awe or a dry "some car, that".

lo... que: how, tucked inside a sentence

To fold a "how..." into a larger sentence, Spanish uses lo + adjective or adverb + que. The adjective agrees with what it describes.

• No sabes lo caro que es. (You have no idea how expensive it is.)
• No te imaginas lo rápido que corre. (You can't imagine how fast he runs.)
• No sabes lo cansada que estoy. (You have no idea how tired I am. - feminine speaker, so cansada)

A close relative is con lo que, which builds a complaint into a clause:

• Con lo que llueve, mejor nos quedamos. (With how much it's raining, we'd better stay in.)

The accent rule, one more time

The exclamative words are the same characters as their relative counterparts, and the accent is the only thing that separates them in writing.

• ¡Qué bonito! (exclamative) vs la casa que compré (relative "that").
• ¡Cómo llueve! (exclamative) vs lo hago como quiero (conjunction "how / as").
• ¡Cuánta gente! (exclamative) vs te doy cuanto tengo (relative "all that").
• ¡Quién lo diría! (Who'd have thought! - exclamative) vs el hombre quien vino (relative).

And the punctuation is double: an inverted ¡ opens the exclamation and a plain ! closes it. Leaving off the opening mark is a real spelling error in Spanish, not an optional stylistic choice.

Common mistakes English speakers make

Inserting an article after qué. There is no "a": it is ¡Qué sorpresa!, never "¡Qué una sorpresa!".

Using muy to intensify. The frame is qué + noun + tan / más + adjective: ¡Qué casa tan grande!, not "¡Qué casa muy grande!".

Dropping the accent. ¡Qué bonito! and ¡Cómo llueve! need their accents; without them the words read as a relative or a conjunction.

Forgetting cuánto agreement. In front of a noun it agrees: ¡Cuánta gente!, ¡Cuántos libros!. Only before a verb does it stay fixed.

Missing the opening ¡. Spanish exclamations are bracketed on both sides. Write the inverted mark.

See also

• Spanish question words - the same accented words qué, cuánto, cómo and quién doing the interrogative job, with the same accent rule.
• The Spanish grammar cheatsheet collects the exclamative frames on one card.