Quiz-Tree

Business

Learning business vocabulary in Spanish opens doors. It helps you close deals, read financial news, and keep up with work conversations in Spanish.

1. Company Structure

Pro tip: In many Latin American companies, the top executive is called the Gerente General rather than a CEO. The title roughly means "chief executive", and you will see it on business cards and org charts.Note that empresa and corporación are not interchangeable. Empresa covers any business from a food stall to a multinational, while corporación implies a formal legal entity with shareholders and a board. Calling a small family shop a corporación sounds unnatural to native speakers.

average score: 58% (all users)

2. People & Roles

Heads up: contador is the standard term for accountant across Latin America, but in Spain you would say contable instead.Worth knowing: socio does not simply mean associate or colleague. It implies shared financial ownership. Calling a coworker your socio signals that you co-own the business, not just that you work alongside them.

average score: 65% (all users)

3. Finance & Money

Pro tip: ingreso and salario both involve money received, but they are not interchangeable. Ingreso covers all sources of revenue such as rent, dividends, and sales, while salario refers only to wages paid for work. A company earns ingresos, never salarios.Ganancia refers strictly to profit after costs are subtracted. A company can have high ingresos and still report zero ganancia if expenses are equally high. Confusing revenue with profit is one of the most common mistakes in business Spanish.

average score: 78% (all users)

4. Investments

Keep in mind: acción has two completely unrelated meanings in Spanish. It can refer to a stock or share in a company, or it can mean an act or action. Context usually clarifies which is meant, but in a financial document acción always refers to a share of ownership.Worth knowing: quiebra is the everyday spoken word for bankruptcy, but the formal legal term is bancarrota. Both are widely understood, yet bancarrota appears in official filings and court documents while quiebra is what you hear in everyday conversation.

average score: 94% (all users)

5. Commerce

Pro tip: acuerdo appears in essential fixed phrases that beginners encounter early. De acuerdo means agreed or OK, and estar de acuerdo means to agree with someone. Acuerdo therefore serves you both as a legal document noun and as everyday conversational currency.

average score: 78% (all users)

6. Accounting

Watch out: balance general is the standard Latin American term for what accountants in other Spanish-speaking regions sometimes call balance de situación. Both refer to the same document, but balance general is the form you will see in Mexican, Colombian, and Argentine financial reports.Did you know that trimestre describes the duration of three months directly, rather than implying one-fourth of something the way quarter does in English? Trimestre always means exactly three months.

7. Marketing

Heads up: anuncio covers both an advertisement and a general announcement. You will see it on billboards and also in internal emails that open with tenemos un anuncio importante. In a marketing context it always means ad, but elsewhere it simply means notice or announcement.Keep in mind: marca does not only mean brand in the commercial sense. It can also mean a mark, stain, or record. In sports, marca mundial means world record. In business contexts it is always brand.

8. Workplace

Note that sede is a subtle false friend (false cognate). While it does translate as headquarters, it also means seat in formal institutional language, as in the sede of the United Nations. In Latin American business speech, sede central is the most natural way to say main office or HQ.Worth knowing: emprendimiento has become the standard word for a startup or new venture across Latin America, especially since the tech industry expanded in the region.

Here you'll learn dozens of essential Spanish business words, from everyday terms like empresa (company) and mercado (market) to more specific ones like minorista (retailer), inversor (investor), and opción sobre acciones (stock option). These are the words that often come up in meetings, business news, emails, and casual conversations with colleagues or clients.

Each quiz builds your skills across reading and listening, so you practice using words in real context rather than just memorizing definitions. Sessions are short (around 5 minutes) so you can fit them into your day whenever it suits you, and you can repeat any quiz as many times as you like.