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samba

nounverbattested in dialogue

  • United States//ˈsɑmbə//

A Brazilian ballroom dance or dance style.

noun

  1. 1

    A Brazilian ballroom dance or dance style.

  2. 2

    A Brazilian musical genre, to which the aforementioned dance is danced, which has its roots in West Africa via the slave trade.

    And when the samba played, the sun would set so high / Ring through my ears and sting my eyes, your Spanish lullaby

    They thought of, I don’t know, monkeys and caipirinhas and samba.”

    Slavery was abolished in Brazil in 1888; until then, Bahia had been a major hub of the country’s slave trade. Samba started there for a reason—a fact that Veloso has returned to, obsessively, throughout his career. […] “A samba parade had turned into a brawl,” a reviewer wrote in the Times, adding that the music “suggested a more cool-headed, grown-up epilogue to the shocks of Tropicália.”

Etymology

Borrowed from Brazilian Portuguese samba, from a Bantu language. Doublet of semba.

verb

  1. 1

    To dance the samba.

    In front of an audience, he tends to have a freer conversation with himself. The right conditions turn him into an extrovert. He sambas, in the Santo Amaro style.

Forms

plural
sambas
past tense
sambaed
past participle
sambaed
present participle
sambaing
third person singular
sambas
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).