Samba

How to spell samba

5 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce samba

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does samba mean?

1. nounA lively Brazilian dance and the syncopated music that accompanies it.

Samba in a sentence

• The carnival float moved to the rhythm of a fast samba.

• She signed up for a beginners samba class at the community centre.

Where does samba come from?

Language of origin: Other

Samba is a Brazilian word that English picked up in the early twentieth century, around the 1880s in Portuguese and the 1920s to 1930s in English as the dance and its music spread internationally. It came into Brazilian Portuguese from the languages of West and Central African peoples brought to Brazil, with the most widely cited source being the Kimbundu word 'semba', which named a particular movement in a circle dance, sometimes glossed as a touch of the bellies or navels of two dancers. From those Afro-Brazilian roots the word came to describe a lively syncopated dance and the carnival music that drives it, especially in Rio de Janeiro. Because it arrived whole from another language, samba has no Latin or Greek parts to lean on, so the spelling is simply learned as the fixed sequence s-a-m-b-a; the only mild trap is the 'mb' in the middle and remembering it ends in a plain 'a'.

How the word is built

• samba (a single borrowed root; not analysable into prefix and suffix in English)