The Spanish verb madrugar means to wake up early or rise early.
As you can see, there isn’t a one-word translation of madrugar in English.
It's a regular verb in Spanish: yo madrugo, tu madrugas, el/ella madruga, nosotros madrugamos, vosotros madrugais, ellos/ellas madrugan.
There’s also the noun la madrugada, which refers to early morning, the hours before dawn or the early hours of the morning.
Technically, anything after midnight is la madrugada, so if you want to say 3 o’clock in the morning in Spanish you can either say las tres de la madrugada or las tres de la mañana.
The small or wee hours of the morning can be referred to as las altas horas de la madrugada.
A person who tends to wake up early in the morning can be described with the adjective madrugador/a, also used for a person who’s an early bird or morning person.
There are also a few handy expressions with the word madrugar.
There’s the saying el que madruga, Dios le ayuda, which literally means ‘the one who wakes up early is helped by God’, but is really closer to ‘the early bird catches the worm’.
Another one is no por mucho madrugar amanece más temprano, which is like saying that ‘waking up early won’t make the sun rise sooner’, but is really the equivalent of saying ‘wishing won't make it happen’ or ‘a watched pot never boils’.
Madrugar is as could be expected a word of Latin origin, originally ‘maturare’, which can mean 'make mature', 'accelerate', 'hurry' or 'hasten'.
That’s understandable as already in antiquity the idea of waking up early to get ahead in life or your competitors was seen as an advantage.
Examples:
No me gusta madrugar porque me acuesto pasada la medianoche.
I don’t like to wake up early because I go to bed after midnight.
Julia es muy madrugadora, se levanta a las 6 de la mañana y sale a correr.
Julia is an early riser, she gets up at 6 and goes for a run.
Llegamos a casa de madrugada porque nuestro vuelo se retrasó varias horas.
We arrived in the early hours of the morning as our flight was delayed several hours.
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