Word.ws English Dictionary

afrobeat

afrobeat noun: music that combines West African musical styles (such as traditional Yoruba music and highlife) with American funk, jazz, and soul influences, with a focus on chanted vocals, complex intersecting rhythms, and percussion.

Noun (1)

afrobeat (uncountable)

  1. Music that combines West African musical styles (such as traditional Yoruba music and highlife) with American funk, jazz, and soul influences, with a focus on chanted vocals, complex intersecting rhythms, and percussion.

Noun (2) capitalized: Afrobeat

Afrobeat (uncountable)

  1. Alternative letter-case form of afrobeat.
    • Cousin-Brother-in-Law comes out humming a seventies Nigerian Afrobeat hit.2018, Tsitsi Dangarembga, This Mournable Body, Faber & Faber (2020), page 166

Forms of afrobeat

alternative formAfrobeat

Origin of afrobeat

From Afro- + beat.

Questions about afrobeat

What does afrobeat mean?
Afrobeat means music that combines West African musical styles (such as traditional Yoruba music and highlife) with American funk, jazz, and soul influences, with a focus on chanted vocals, complex intersecting rhythms, and percussion.
What part of speech is afrobeat?
Afrobeat is a noun.

Words near afrobeat in the dictionary

  1. Afroasiatic
  2. Afroasiaticist
  3. Afroasiaticists
  4. afrobatrachian
  5. afrobatrachians
  6. afrobeat
  7. Afrobeats
  8. Afrocentric
  9. Afrocentrically
  10. Afrocentricism
  11. Afrocentricities

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: afrobeat (page history and authors); Afrobeat (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “afrobeat.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/afrobeat. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.