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macumba

American  
[muh-koom-buh] / məˈkʊm bə /

noun

  1. a Brazilian cult incorporating the use of fetishes and sorcery and deriving largely from African practices.

Macumba British  
/ maˈkumba /

noun

  1. a religious cult in Brazil that combines Christian and voodoo elements

"Collins English Dictionary — Complete & Unabridged" 2012 Digital Edition © William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd. 1979, 1986 © HarperCollins Publishers 1998, 2000, 2003, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2009, 2012

Etymology

Origin of macumba

Borrowed into English from Portuguese around 1935–40

Example Sentences

Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.

Bertolucci, biting his knuckles in his Rome apartment, charged Grimaldi with censorship and, half seriously, with putting "a kind of curse on me�a macumba."

From Time Magazine Archive

An even faster growing form of worship is spiritualism, which has more than 10 million followers who practice everything from African fetishism and nature rites to macumba, the Brazilian version of voodoo.

From Time Magazine Archive

Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023

Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.