Cipote / cipota
Kid — the Central American word for a child or teenager, and one you should not carry to Spain.
Related lesson: Salvadoran Spanish: A Survival Guide.
Hear it in context
Los cipotes ya vienen de la escuela.
The kids are on their way back from school.
Desde cipota me gustó el mar.
I've loved the sea since I was a little girl.
No seás cipote, ya tenés treinta años.
Don't be such a child — you're thirty.
What It Actually Means
Cipote / cipota is a child, from toddling to teenage — the Salvadoran everyday word where Spain says chaval, Mexico chamaco, Peru chibolo and Guatemala patojo. It is neutral in tone: newspapers use it, mothers use it, schools use it. Its rougher, more colloquial twin is bicho, which means the same thing with the collar turned up.
Where It Comes From
Uncertain, and the dictionaries admit as much. The Central American sense is usually filed alongside a Peninsular cipote meaning something short, stubby or club-like, with the leap from object to child left unexplained; a Nawat source has been proposed and never demonstrated. The word is old enough in the region to have folklore of its own: El Cipitío, the eternal small boy of Salvadoran legend — son of La Siguanaba, backwards feet, endless appetite — carries the same root, which tells you the word was ordinary long before anyone tried to date it.
How Natives Use It
For actual children first (tengo dos cipotes), then nostalgically about oneself (de cipote vivía en Santa Ana), then pointedly at grown-ups behaving childishly (no seás cipote). It is shared across Honduras, Guatemala and Nicaragua, which makes it one of the few words that works in every capital between Guatemala City and Managua.
Common Pitfall
Do not take it east or across the Atlantic. In Spain — and in the Dominican Republic — cipote is coarse slang for the penis, so a fond remark about the cipotes in the garden reads very differently in Madrid than it does in San Salvador. The Central American sense is entirely clean at home and entirely unusable abroad, which is a good general lesson about words for children in Spanish: they almost never travel.