Reggae

How to spell reggae

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce reggae

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does reggae mean?

1. nounA style of popular music originating in Jamaica, marked by a strong offbeat rhythm and bass-led grooves.

Reggae in a sentence

• The festival closed with a long set of classic reggae from the seventies.

• He learned to play reggae on a battered electric guitar.

Where does reggae come from?

Language of origin: Other

Reggae is a Jamaican English word that names the music style which grew out of ska and rocksteady in the late 1960s. Its origin is genuinely uncertain, but the most widely repeated account traces it to a Jamaican term 'rege-rege', which meant ragged clothing or, in another sense, a quarrel or row. The word was fixed in print and popular use by the 1968 Toots and the Maytals song 'Do the Reggay', whose spelling soon settled into the modern 'reggae'. From Jamaica it spread internationally through the 1970s, carried above all by Bob Marley, and entered general English as the standard name for the genre. The spelling trap lies in the doubled 'g' and the unexpected '-ae' ending, neither of which is sounded out the way an English speaker might guess.

How the word is built

• reggae (a single, unanalysable root from Jamaican English; no prefix or suffix)