Mafia

How to spell mafia

5 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce mafia

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does mafia mean?

1. nounAn organised secret society engaged in crime, originally Sicilian, run through loyalty, intimidation, and hierarchy.
2. nounA close, exclusive group that dominates an activity or field through influence and mutual protection.

Mafia in a sentence

• The documentary traced how the mafia laundered money through legitimate restaurants.

• Critics joked that a small mafia of senior partners controlled every promotion in the firm.

• Prosecutors spent years building a case against the local mafia boss.

• The tech mafia of founders kept reinvesting in each other's startups.

Where does mafia come from?

Language of origin: Italian

The word comes from the Italian and specifically Sicilian dialect word mafia, which originally carried a sense closer to bravado, boldness, or swagger rather than organised crime. Its deeper origins are genuinely disputed, with one popular suggestion tracing it to an Arabic word meaning something like boasting or refuge, a legacy of the long Arab presence in medieval Sicily, though this cannot be proven. The term entered wider use after an 1863 Sicilian play, I mafiusi di la Vicaria, dramatised the proud, defiant prisoners of Palermo, and from there it attached to the secret criminal brotherhoods of the island. English borrowed it in the second half of the 1800s, and the meaning hardened through American newspaper coverage of Sicilian immigrant crime syndicates. The spelling stays faithful to the Italian, with a single f and a single i, which is the trap for writers who instinctively want to double a consonant or add a second i.

How the word is built

• mafia (an unanalysable Italian/Sicilian root borrowed whole into English; no separable prefix or suffix)