In Italian, a straightforward way to say to waste is with the verb sprecare. You can use it for all sorts of situations – wasting food (sprecare cibo), wasting time (sprecare tempo), or wasting money (sprecare soldi), just to name a few.
But if you’d like to add a little flair to your Italian, try the idiomatic expression spendere e spandere. It’s more or less the equivalent of the English idiom to burn a hole in your pocket and is used specifically when talking about wasting money in a lavish or careless way.
spendere e spandere
to waste money
You may be wondering what the difference is between the two verbs spendere and spandere. After all, there’s only one letter that separates them!
Spendere, quite simply, means to spend money, or if we want to be even more precise, “to give money to others in exchange for a product or service.” You can also use it figuratively to talk about how you use your time for example (Come spendi il tuo tempo libero? = How do you spend your free time?)
Non voglio spendere troppo oggi.
I don’t want to spend too much today.
Spandere, in its most literal sense, means “to spread evenly over a large surface.” This means it can be translated, not only as to spread, but also to pour, to scatter, to diffuse, to expand, and to spray depending on what’s being spread. It can also be used in a figurative sense to describe the spread of information or a person’s fame, for example.
Cerca di non spandere l’acqua sul tavolo.
Try not to spill the water on the table.
La sua fama si sta spandendo in tutto il mondo.
His fame is spreading across the world.
However, in the case of this particular idiom, spandere simply functions as a more playful, reinforcing synonym of spendere, giving it the meaning “to spend excessively” or “to squander.” (Source: Impariamo Italiano)
Heather Broster is a graduate with honours in linguistics from the University of Western Ontario. She is an aspiring polyglot, proficient in English and Italian, as well as Japanese, Welsh, and French to varying degrees of fluency. Originally from Toronto, Heather has resided in various countries, notably Italy for a period of six years. Her primary focus lies in the fields of language acquisition, education, and bilingual instruction.
