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This paper studies the use of the expression hasta las trancas --originally hasta las trencas-- which is widely used in modern colloquial Spanish in Europe and to a lesser extent in Mexico, but not included in the DRAE nor in most other dictionaries. A corpus of examples has been collected based on questionnaires and sampling in the provinces of Almería, Granada and Málaga, in Internet discussion forums, the daily press and periodicals and literary texts. In the study the different meanings of this expression are listed, and the different uses of each semantic value are tabled (e.g. predicative and attributive verb combinations, and noun and adjective modifications). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]