Borrowed into English from Portuguese around 1935–40
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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
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
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.
