Spanish Word of the Day: Apagón

Apagón is the Spanish word for blackout.

It comes from the word apagar, which is the verb ‘to switch off’ in Spanish.

This comes from the Latin pacare, which means to pacify or subdue.

A synonym is un corte de electricidad (an electricity or power cut) but apagón is similar to the English word blackout in that it tends to imply a massive power failure affecting a whole neighbourhood, city or as we saw on Monday April 28th 2025, a whole country.

Much of the press referred to what happened yesterday as un apagón nacional (a national blackout), un apagón general (a general blackout) or un apagón masivo (a major blackout).

If you want to be more specific about it being an electricity blackout, you can say apagón eléctrico or even apagón de luz.

Luz means light in Spanish, but most of the time Spaniards refer to the power in the sense of electricity as la luz, instead of saying la electricidad.

So if they were to say ‘Has the power gone?’, they’d say ‘¿Se ha ido la luz?’, or for ‘Is the power back?’ they’d ask ‘¿Ha vuelto la luz?’.

In a more official sense, you can refer to the power supply as el suministro eléctrico.

Just like in English, you can also call a media blackout un apagón informativo.

And when Microsoft experienced its global IT outage in 2024, the Spanish press referred to it as un apagón informatico.

In the medical sense, if someone suffers a blackout, in the sense of losing consciousness, in Spanish you call it un desmayo or un desvanecimiento, not un apagón. Spaniards also talk about a mental blackout as una laguna mental.

So there you have it, the most common usage of the word apagón in Spanish is to refer to a power blackout, a word that you’ll find all across the Spanish press today.

Examples:

Es el apagón más grande en la historia de España.

It’s the biggest blackout in Spanish history.

Todavía no se conocen las causas del apagón.

The causes of the blackout are not yet known.