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I have heard the following sentence in the Narcos TV series:

Dicen que los hombres valientes tienen la costumbre de morirse rápido.

Is there any difference in meaning between "morir" and "morirse"? I could not find it in https://dle.rae.es/morir.

https://www.thoughtco.com/morir-vs-morirse-3079758 says that "morirse" is an alternative when talking about natural deaths, but I don't think that's the case in my example.

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  • Thanks for sharing your research. I think I found something that may be a bit more helpful: en.wiktionary.org/wiki/morirse. (Is "homens" a typo?)
    – aparente001
    Commented Dec 16, 2019 at 19:44
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    @aparente001 yes, it was a typo. I have fixed it. Thanks for the link.
    – Alan Evangelista
    Commented Dec 16, 2019 at 19:55
  • There are browser extensions that spell check Spanish. They don't catch everything, but they can be quite helpful.
    – aparente001
    Commented Dec 16, 2019 at 19:59

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I'll try an answer. "Morirse" is more colloquial than "morir" and makes the sentence of the question more informal. There is no difference in meaning in this specific context.

Furthermore:

in figurative contexts, "morirse" is more usual. Example:

  • Me morí del aburrimiento
  • Me morí del susto

Reference: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/morirse

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Morirse is what we call 'verbo reflexivo', while morir no.

Examples: 1.- Se ha muerto el vecino. El vecino is subject and also 'se' refers to el vecino. 2.- El vecino murió. Similar, 'el vecino' is the subject. 3.- Se ha muerto de risa. This is an expression, usually this kind of expressions are with 'morirse'. In the first case, we are trying to impersonate the situation, that is we are not judging how, or other circustances of the death, we probably don't know. In the second example, it is 'harder'

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    The definition of a reflexive verb is that the subject acts on himself/herself and this does not happen in "morirse". The correct terminology is pronominal verb (or "verbo pronominal" in Spanish). Regarding the meaning, I'm not sure what you meant with "trying to impersonate the situation". Trying to impersonate the death of somebody ?!
    – Alan Evangelista
    Commented Dec 27, 2019 at 12:25

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