Word.ws English Dictionary

bwana

/ˈbwɑːnə/

bwana noun: big boss, important person.

Noun

bwana (plural bwanas)

  1. (slang) Big boss, important person.
    • It is Jim C.’s custom always to say “Up Simba” in a fake-deep bwana voice as he hefts the camera to his right shoulder […]2005, David Foster Wallace, Consider the Lobster and Other Essays, New York: Little, Brown and Company, →ISBN, page 208

Forms of bwana

pluralbwanas

Origin of bwana

Borrowed from Swahili bwana (“master”), from Arabic أَبُونَا (ʔabūnā, “our father”). Doublet of abbot.

Words that rhyme with bwana

48 more rhymesFewer rhymes

Questions about bwana

What does bwana mean?
Bwana means big boss, important person.
What part of speech is bwana?
Bwana is a noun.
How do you pronounce bwana?
Bwana is pronounced /ˈbwɑːnə/.
What is the plural of bwana?
The plural of bwana is bwanas.

Words near bwana in the dictionary

  1. BWA
  2. bwaaa
  3. BWAD
  4. BWADs
  5. bwahaha
  6. bwana
  7. bwanas
  8. bwarp
  9. BWAs
  10. BWB
  11. bwbach

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: bwana (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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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Vealhurl-bwana.wav.

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