Both words seem to be translated as "gritar". But in English, they have distinct meanings. You might shout simply to be heard in a noisy place, but you usually scream because of high emotion (e.g., terror, anger, delight). Is there any way to make this distinction in Spanish?
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2One of the most fascinating and sometimes puzzling things about learning other languages is that the semantic fields of words in one language are not necessarily the same in other languages. Nor does the clearly differentiated usage in one language remain the same in other languages and vice versa.– AradnixCommented Jun 30 at 20:18
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3 Answers
English is lexically much richer than Spanish when it comes to ways of doing things: ways of shouting, ways of speaking, ways of laughing, ways of walking, ways of shining, etc.
Spanish will need an adverb or an adjective in predicative position to provide a more or less accurate equivalent for "scream": gritar despavorido, gritar con furia, gritar de placer.
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gritar is scream
shout is levantar la voz in regular parlance.
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1In regular parlance you can use interchange gritar by levantar la voz in lots of situations. There are lots of examples: Google gave me this as a first result for my search: Educar sin levantar la voz. Cómo pasar del grito al diálogo– jachguate ♦Commented May 31 at 21:19
It could be said that the distance between (to) shout and scream is equivalent to what sets apart the verbs vociferar and gritar in Spanish
I'd say that those pairs are quite symmetric. Just as the English words appears to differ somehow in their loudness, and in their relative pitch (with a higher tone for scream[ing]), the Spanish words might be considered parallel in that regard of their tones and volumes differences.
Anyway, the Spanish verb to raise one's voice, which the OP seeks as a different word than gritar, would be:
vociferar 1
