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Obama

proper nounproper nouncommon in dialogue

  • United Kingdom//əʊˈbɑː.mə//
  • United States//oʊˈbɑ.mə//

An African surname from Luo.

proper noun

  1. 1

    An African surname from Luo.

  2. 2

    An African surname from Luo. Barack Obama, 44th president of the United States (2009–2017).

    (The Browns gave the Obamas an ornate penholder made from the timber of a Victorian antislave ship.)

    From his studies of these thinkers and activists, Mr. Obama took what he called the “Niebuhrian” lesson that we can have “a cleareyed view of the world and the realities of cruelty and sin and greed and violence, and yet, still maintain a sense of hope and possibility, as an act of will and leap of faith.”

Etymology

Etymology tree Luo obam Luo Mobamder. English Obama A corruption of the Luo by-name Mobam (“born with a crooked back”), itself from Luo obam (“to lean or bend”).

proper noun

  1. 1

    A city in Fukui Prefecture, Japan. See Wikipedia:Obama, Fukui.

  2. 2

    A Japanese surname.

  3. 3

    A samurai clan of feudal Japan.

Etymology

Transliteration of Japanese 小浜.

Forms

plural
Obamas
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).