lobo

What it means

1. 1.

   Tacky, gaudy, in poor taste. Applied to clothes, decoration, cars, weddings and people, and almost always about excess rather than cheapness — too much gold, too tight, too loud.

2. 2.

   Of a person: someone whose taste marks them out, which in practice means the judgement is about class as much as aesthetics. Worth knowing before you use it.

Literally: Wolf.

Examples with translations

• Esa camisa está muy loba, hermano.

  That shirt is seriously tacky, mate.

• El matrimonio fue lobísimo: carroza y todo.

  The wedding was outrageously naff — horse-drawn carriage, the lot.

Where it comes from

Not from the animal directly. The likeliest route is through colonial casta vocabulary, where lobo named a mixed-race category, leaving behind a word whose sense of 'low-status' outlived the system that coined it. That history is invisible to present-day speakers but it explains why the judgement always tilts the way it does.

Other forms

Spellings and variants:

loba, lobísimo

Similar terms:

corroncho, guache