Limbo

How to spell limbo

5 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce limbo

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does limbo mean?

1. nounA state of being stuck, forgotten, or left waiting in unresolved uncertainty.
2. nounA West Indian dance in which performers lean backwards and pass under a horizontal bar that is lowered with each round.

Limbo in a sentence

• The project has been in limbo since the funding was frozen.

• The resort hosted a limbo contest on the beach every evening.

• Her visa application left her in limbo for months.

• Guests at the party took turns at the limbo as the pole dropped lower.

Where does limbo come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word comes straight from the Latin limbus, which literally meant an edge, a border, or the hem of a garment. In medieval Christian theology Limbo was imagined as a region on the very border of Hell, the dwelling place for souls (such as unbaptised infants and the virtuous who lived before Christ) who belonged neither in Heaven nor in punishment. Because it described a place of waiting at the margins, the word slipped into ordinary English by the 1600s to mean any condition of being stuck, forgotten, or left in uncertain suspense. The unrelated West Indian dance called the limbo, in which dancers bend backwards under a lowering bar, arose in Trinidad in the twentieth century and is generally traced to the English word 'limber' rather than to the Latin border; the two senses simply converged on the same spelling. The single silent-looking trap is the 'b', which stays firmly pronounced here unlike the silent 'b' in 'limb'.

How the word is built

• limb- (from Latin limbus: edge, border, hem)
• -o (Italian/Latin noun ending)