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Body Parts in Spanish: Words With Pronunciation

By Jack Ratcliffe  |  2 November 2026

Body parts in Spanish are the words for the parts of the human body, such as cabeza (head), ojos (eyes), mano (hand) and pie (foot), and most learners need somewhere between 30 and 40 of them to describe pain, appearance and everyday routines like washing up or getting dressed. Spanish treats these words a little differently from English: every body part carries a grammatical gender, el or la, and sentences about pain or injury almost always use the definite article instead of a possessive, so a Spanish speaker says "me duele la cabeza," literally "the head hurts me," rather than "mi cabeza duele." Here is the full list, with pronunciation and the grammar that actually trips learners up.

Basic Body Parts in Spanish (Head to Toe)

The table below lists the body parts most learners need first, in head-to-toe order rather than alphabetically, since that is usually how a Spanish course introduces them too. An adult human skeleton has 206 bones, according to Wikipedia's overview of the human skeleton, but you will never need a separate word for each one. A working vocabulary of around 30 terms covers almost everything you are likely to say about your own body in everyday conversation, from a stubbed toe to a sore shoulder.

Spanish	Pronunciation	English
la cabeza	lah kah-BEH-sah	head
el pelo / el cabello	ehl PEH-loh / kah-BEH-yoh	hair
la cara	lah KAH-rah	face
la frente	lah FREHN-teh	forehead
los ojos	lohs OH-hohs	eyes
las cejas	lahs SEH-hahs	eyebrows
la nariz	lah nah-REES	nose
la boca	lah BOH-kah	mouth
los labios	lohs LAH-byohs	lips
los dientes	lohs DYEHN-tehs	teeth
la lengua	lah LEHN-gwah	tongue
las orejas	lahs oh-REH-hahs	ears
la barbilla	lah bar-BEE-yah	chin
el cuello	ehl KWEH-yoh	neck
el hombro	ehl OHM-broh	shoulder
el brazo	ehl BRAH-soh	arm
el codo	ehl KOH-doh	elbow
la muñeca	lah moo-NYEH-kah	wrist
la mano	lah MAH-noh	hand
los dedos	lohs DEH-dohs	fingers
el pecho	ehl PEH-choh	chest
la espalda	lah ehs-PAHL-dah	back
el estómago	ehl ehs-TOH-mah-goh	stomach
la cintura	lah seen-TOO-rah	waist
la cadera	lah kah-DEH-rah	hip
la pierna	lah PYEHR-nah	leg
la rodilla	lah roh-DEE-yah	knee
el tobillo	ehl toh-BEE-yoh	ankle
el pie	ehl PYEH	foot
los dedos del pie	lohs DEH-dohs dehl PYEH	toes
la piel	lah PYEHL	skin
el corazón	ehl koh-rah-SOHN	heart
el cerebro	ehl seh-REH-broh	brain

Pronunciation follows regular Spanish rules once you know a few patterns: ll sounds like a y (cuello, rodilla, tobillo), the Spanish r is a light tap rather than the English r (nariz, brazo), and z before a vowel sounds like a soft th in Spain or a plain s across most of Latin America (nariz, corazón). None of these sounds require anything exotic, just repeated listening and speaking practice until your mouth gets used to them.

One exception is worth memorizing on its own: la mano. Spanish nouns ending in -o are almost always masculine, but mano is a rare holdover from Latin that kept its original feminine gender, so it stays la mano, never el mano, no matter how tempting the -o ending makes it feel.

How Spanish Grammar Handles Body Parts

English almost always pairs a body part with a possessive: my head, your hands, his back. Spanish usually does the opposite. When the owner is already clear from context, especially with reflexive verbs, Spanish drops the possessive and uses the definite article instead. "Me lavo las manos" means "I wash my hands," not literally "I wash the hands," even though manos follows las rather than mis. The reflexive pronoun me already tells you whose hands are being washed, so adding mis as well would be redundant, and a native speaker would notice the extra word immediately. This pattern is a well documented feature of Spanish grammar rather than an informal shortcut.

The same pattern shows up with pain and injury, one of the most common reasons to reach for body-part vocabulary in the first place. Spanish uses the verb doler (to hurt) with an indirect object pronoun rather than a possessive: "me duele la cabeza" translates literally as "the head hurts to me," which is why English speakers often say it backwards the first few times. "Le duelen los pies" means "his or her feet hurt," with the plural duelen because pies is plural. Making the verb agree with the body part, not with the person feeling the pain, is the single most common grammar mistake beginners make with this structure, and it is a rule the Real Academia Española, Spain's official language regulator, documents clearly in its grammar guidance.

There are a few exceptions where a possessive is required rather than optional, mainly when whose body part you mean is not obvious from context, such as comparing two people: "Sus manos son más grandes que las mías" (his hands are bigger than mine). Outside comparisons like that, defaulting to the definite article is the safer, more natural choice.

Common Spanish Phrases and Idioms Using Body Parts

Body-part vocabulary shows up constantly in Spanish idioms, often with a meaning that has nothing literal to do with the body part itself. Learning a handful of these early makes native speech sound far less puzzling the first time you hear one.

• Costar un ojo de la cara (to cost an eye of the face) - to be extremely expensive, the Spanish equivalent of "cost an arm and a leg."
• Hablar hasta por los codos (to talk even through the elbows) - to talk a lot, used for someone who never stops chatting.
• Meter la pata (to put in the paw) - to make an embarrassing mistake or blunder.
• No tener pelos en la lengua (to have no hairs on the tongue) - to speak bluntly, without holding back.
• Dar la mano (to give the hand) - to shake hands.
• Tomar el pelo (to take the hair) - to tease or pull someone's leg.

Notice that several of these idioms reuse the exact vocabulary from the table above in a completely different sense. That is one more reason learning the literal words first pays off twice: once for everyday description, and again when the same word turns up buried inside an idiom.

Talking About Pain, Health and the Doctor in Spanish

Being able to say where something hurts is one of the most practically useful things a traveler or new resident can learn in any language, and it comes up at pharmacies, doctor's offices and casual conversations about how someone is feeling far more often than most vocabulary lists expect.

• Me duele la cabeza.: I have a headache.
• Me duelen las piernas.: My legs hurt.
• ¿Qué te pasa?: What's wrong? / What's the matter?
• Tengo dolor de estómago.: I have a stomach ache.
• Me torcí el tobillo.: I twisted my ankle.

Use dolor de plus a body part as an alternative to doler when you want to describe pain as a noun rather than a verb, which some learners find easier to build sentences with at first: "tengo dolor de cabeza" works just as well as "me duele la cabeza," and both sound completely natural to a native speaker.

Tips for Remembering Spanish Body Part Vocabulary

• Learn head to toe, not alphabetically. Grouping words by physical location, the way this guide does, gives your memory a built-in order to retrace instead of a random alphabetical list.
• Touch the part as you say it. Physically touching your own cabeza, nariz or mano while saying the word out loud creates a stronger memory link than reading it silently.
• Learn la mano as its own exception. Isolating the handful of gender exceptions early stops them from quietly undermining your confidence with every other -o and -a noun later.
• Practice doler sentences out loud. Say a few different versions, me duele la cabeza, me duelen los pies, te duele el brazo, until the pattern feels automatic rather than translated.
• Use spaced repetition rather than one long session. Short, repeated exposure spread across several days reliably beats a single hour of cramming for vocabulary this size.

Games built around spatial, context-based vocabulary learning tend to help here too, since attaching la mano or el tobillo to an actual scene in a 3D world gives the word somewhere real to live in memory, rather than just another line on a flashcard deck.

Written by Jack Ratcliffe

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