battuta

[buh-too-tuh, baht-too-tah]

noun

Music.

plural

battutas, battute 

1. a beat.

2. a measure.

Word History and Origins

Origin of battuta¹

1810–20; < Italian, feminine past participle of battere to beat < Latin battuere

Example Sentences

In 1325, a young Amazigh by the name of Abu Abdullah Muhammad Ibn Battuta left Tangier for Mecca.

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I drew some inspiration from Ibn Battuta’s travelogue style for my novel “The Moor’s Account,” which is based on the true story of Estebanico — an enslaved Black man from Morocco who was brought to Florida on a colonial expedition in 1528, but quickly found himself stranded in America with three Spanish noblemen.

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At the end of his life, Ibn Battuta finally returned to Tangier and wrote — or rather, dictated — his travelogue.

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Ibn Battuta’s and Marco Polo’s accounts of their adventures in the 13th and 14th centuries are still widely read, but as a modern genre, travel writing would not take off for another few centuries, until European colonialism had opened Africa and Asia to assorted gentlemen — and occasional gentlewomen — travelers.

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On a visit to Cairo in the 14th century, when the city’s 500,000 inhabitants made it the world’s largest city outside China, the explorer Ibn Battuta noted that an outbreak of the bubonic plague was killing as many as 20,000 people a day.

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