Latin America

American  

[lat-n uh-mer-i-kuh] / ˈlæt n əˈmɛr ɪ kə /

noun

1. the part of the American continents south of the United States in which Spanish, Portuguese, or French is officially spoken.

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Latin America British  

noun

1. those areas of America whose official languages are Spanish and Portuguese, derived from Latin: South America, Central America, Mexico, and certain islands in the Caribbean

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Latin America Cultural  

1. A term applied to all of the Spanish- or Portuguese-speaking nations south of the United States.

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Other Word Forms

• Latin American adjective

Etymology

Origin of Latin America

First recorded in 1890–95

Example Sentences

The streamer first landed in Latin America back in 2011, started making local content in 2018 and first opened offices in Buenos Aires in 2021.

From Los Angeles Times • Apr. 8, 2026

AFP works in 26 languages with Facebook's fact-checking program, including in Asia, Latin America and the European Union.

From Barron's • Apr. 2, 2026

Sales ticked up in North America as well as in the Europe, Middle East and Africa region and in the Asia Pacific and Latin America market.

From The Wall Street Journal • Mar. 31, 2026

The state is structurally isolated from the broader U.S. system and heavily dependent on imports from Latin America, Canada, Asia and the Middle East.

From MarketWatch • Mar. 27, 2026

In many parts of Latin America there is a resentment, abundantly justified, of U.S. workers with big budgets swooping in to profit from the work of poor local scholars.

From "1491" by Charles C. Mann