Roma

How to spell roma

4 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce roma

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does roma mean?

1. nounThe Roma, an ethnic group with origins in northern India and a long history of living across Europe, also known by the language name Romani.
2. nounA small, oval, meaty plum tomato commonly used for sauces and canning.

Roma in a sentence

• The museum exhibition traced the history of the roma across Europe.

• The recipe calls for a tin of chopped roma tomatoes.

• Many roma families settled in central Europe over several centuries.

• She grows roma tomatoes because they make a thicker sauce.

Where does roma come from?

Language of origin: Sanskrit

Roma is the endonym, or self-chosen name, of the Romani people, and it is the plural of the Romani word Rom, which means 'a man' or 'a member of the group'. The Romani language is Indo-Aryan and descends ultimately from Sanskrit, a reflection of the fact that the Roma originated in northern India before migrating westward and reaching Europe by roughly the 1300s. The root Rom is widely traced to the Sanskrit word doma (sometimes written domba), which named a caste of travelling musicians, singers, and entertainers. As the people spread across Europe, outsiders often mislabelled them 'Gypsies', from a mistaken belief that they came from Egypt, so the accurate term Roma has steadily replaced that older exonym in modern usage. The same root surfaces in related forms such as Romani for the language and Romany as an older English spelling, which can make the simple two-syllable spelling 'roma' easy to overthink.

How the word is built

• Rom (a Romani man or member of the people)
• -a (plural ending in the Romani language)