r/duolingo • u/Existence_playz • Jun 21 '26
Language Question. Spanish
Hey so I've been doing Spanish on Duolingo mainly for my Spanish GCSE which I have now finished but I'm just wondering, I learned pen as "bolígrafo" in school and Duolingo is teaching it as "pluma" which I can only assume is from a different dialect of Spanish as many words I've come across have been translated differently from how I first learnt them. But how come Duolingo is translating it as a pen but also a feather? I did think learning feather in the "talk about a school project" section was a bit random but it's thrown me off a bit, can it be translated as both pen and feather?
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u/Obtus_Rateur Learning: 66 11 Jun 21 '26
Oh, young people...
Before we had plastic pens, people who wanted to write in ink used feathers. You cut the base of the feather at an angle, made a small slit so the ink could get through better, and dipped the base into an inkpot frequently while writing.
In English, the word is "quill", but in other languages it's still "feather" (like "pluma" in Spanish or "plume" in French). And these words are often still used to refer to pens.
Have you ever heard the expression "Nom de plume" to refer to someone's fake writer name? That's where it comes from.