It’s that time of the week when we examine a pair of Spanish nouns whose form is deceptively similar but whose meaning is quite different depending on their ending and gender. This week’s masculine and feminine pair are seto and seta.
Let’s start with seto (masculine). You can listen to its pronunciation here:
Coming from the same Latin root as the septum that separates your nostrils, un seto is often found enclosing or separating gardens and can be one of two things: a fence (an inanimate structure made of strips of various substances and more commonly called una cerca in Spanish) or a hedge, a line of bushes and shrubs that can also be called un seto vivo (vivo meaning living).
un seto de aligustre
a privet hedge
Había una estatua en el jardín, junto al seto de buganvillas.
There was a statue in the garden, next to the bougainvillea hedge.
Se podaban los setos.
The hedges would be pruned.
El primer salto es un seto de 1,36 metros de altura.
The first jump is a fence measuring 1.36 metres.
Now let’s move on to seta (feminine), whose pronunciation can be heard here:
Seta is used of any of a number of umbrella-shaped fungi that grow particularly in the wild. Una seta may be either a mushroom (and probably edible) or a toadstool (often extremely poisonous):
la seta oyster
the oyster mushroom
Limpiar las setas y cortarlas en tiras.
Clean the mushrooms and cut them into strips.
la época de recoger setas
the mushroom-picking season
esa seta de tallo blanco con caperuza roja, jaspeada por puntos blancos
that toadstool with a white stalk and a red cap speckled with white spots
DID YOU KNOW?
To talk about cultivated button mushrooms, use champiñón (masculine), whose plural is champiñones:
el cultivo del champiñón
mushroom growing
Todos los champiñones deben estar frescos e intactos.
All the (button) mushrooms should be fresh and whole.
To pick over the meanings of another pair of nouns whose forms differ only in gender and ending, come back next week.
