Word.ws English Dictionary

bassa

bassa is the obsolete spelling of bashaw.

Meaning of bashaw

Noun

bashaw (plural bashaws)

  1. (archaic, historical) A pasha.
    • Radzivilius was much taken with the bassa’s palace in Cairo […].1624, Democritus Junior [pseudonym; Robert Burton], The Anatomy of Melancholy: […], 2nd edition, Oxford, Oxfordshire: […] John Lichfield and James Short, for Henry Cripps, →OCLC, partition II...
  2. (archaic, broadly, derogatory, often) A grandee.
  3. A very large siluroid fish (Pylodictis olivaris) of the Mississippi valley; the goujon or mudcat.

See all 4 meanings of bashaw

Noun capitalized: Bassa

Bassa pl (plural only)

  1. (plural, plural-only) A West African ethnic group primarily native to Liberia.

Proper noun capitalized: Bassa

Bassa

  1. A Kru language spoken by this people.

Forms of bassa

pluralbassas

Words formed from bassa

Questions about bassa

What does bassa mean?
Bassa means a West African ethnic group primarily native to Liberia.
What is bassa the obsolete spelling of?
Bassa is the obsolete spelling of bashaw.
What part of speech is bassa?
Bassa can be a noun or a proper noun.
What is the plural of bassa?
The plural of bassa is bassas.

Words near bassa in the dictionary

  1. bass-bars
  2. bass-relief
  3. bass-reliefs
  4. bass-violist
  5. bass-violists
  6. bassa
  7. Bassa Vah
  8. bassackward
  9. bassackwards
  10. Bassador
  11. Bassadore

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: bassa (page history and authors); Bassa (page history and authors); bashaw (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: “bassa.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/bassa. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.