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samba

US/ˈsɑmbə/
nounB1+Occasional — familiar, but not everyday · #10,215 of 15,258neutral

Other forms: sambas

Samba is a fast Brazilian dance with a rolling rhythm. Dance the samba, a samba school, samba drums.

It came out of the Afro-Brazilian communities of Rio and Bahia and became the sound of carnival, where a samba school is a whole neighbourhood organisation that spends the year preparing one parade. The bounce comes from the knees, not the feet.

UnknownUnknown · Public domain

Definitions of samba

  1. 1nounsambaA fast Brazilian dance with a rolling rhythm.B1+

    “At the carnival in Rio, dancers in feathered costumes danced the samba through the streets.”

samba is a dance.

Where it comes from

Brazilian Portuguese samba comes from a Bantu language of West Central Africa.

  1. pt-BR

    samba

  2. English, today

    samba

pt-BR samba, from a bnt language. a doublet of semba.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in Dance

Practise this word

samba in the wild

  • Present in the Portuguese language at least since the 19th century, the word "samba" was originally used to designate a "popular dance".

    Samba

  • Today synonymous with the rhythm of samba, this new samba brought innovations in rhythm, melody and also in thematic aspects.

    Samba

  • Bossa nova is a relaxed style of samba developed in the late 1950s and early 1960s in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

    Bossa nova

  • Brazilian jazz can refer to both a genre, largely influenced by bossa nova and samba, that exists in many nations and the jazz music of Brazil itself.

    Brazilian jazz

  • Samba rock is a Brazilian dance culture and music genre that fuses samba with rock, soul, and funk.

    Samba rock

From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.