Pichear
To ignore someone or something deliberately — to blank a message, blow off a plan, or drop a subject entirely.
Related lesson: Puerto Rican Spanish: A Survival Guide.
Hear it in context
Le escribí tres veces y me picheó.
I messaged him three times and he blanked me.
No me pichees, que es importante.
Don't ignore me — this matters.
Pichea eso y vámonos.
Forget about that and let's go.
What It Actually Means
Pichear is to ignore on purpose. You pichear a message by leaving it read and unanswered, a person by walking past them, a plan by simply not turning up. The deliberateness is the whole meaning — me picheó is an accusation, never a description of an oversight, and the natural English is blanked me or ghosted me rather than missed me.
The imperative has drifted somewhere useful: pichea eso is not “ignore that thing” so much as let it go, never mind, not worth it — advice offered to a friend nursing a grievance.
Where It Comes From
From English to pitch, borrowed through baseball, which in Puerto Rico is not a foreign sport but the national one. In its literal sense pichear is what a picher does on the mound, and sports commentary uses it that way daily.
How a word for throwing a ball became a word for ignoring a person is not documented, and Puerto Ricans offer competing explanations: that the pitcher is the one who decides to give the batter nothing to hit, or simply that to pitch something is to toss it aside. Both are folk accounts and neither should be repeated as fact — what is certain is only the English source and the baseball route. Its close relatives, pichar and picheo, follow the same pattern as janguear and lonchar: English verb in, Spanish conjugation on.
How Natives Use It
Regular first-conjugation, no irregularities: picheo, picheas, pichea, picheamos, pichean; picheé, picheaste, picheó. Everyday shapes include me picheó el mensaje, me está pichando (both spellings circulate), dejar de pichear and the noun el picheo for the treatment itself. It is young, informal and utterly ordinary among friends — the standard verb for the social crime of the smartphone era.
Common Pitfall
It is a complaint, so it lands as one: telling someone me picheaste is accusing them of a small betrayal, not noting a scheduling problem, and it will be answered defensively. Keep it out of professional messages, where no me contestaron does the job without the sting. Outside the island and the Dominican Republic it will not be understood in this sense at all — in most of Latin America pichear means only what a pitcher does, and in Spain not even that.