capanga
capanga noun: a thug or bodyguard in Brazil.
Noun
capanga (plural capangas)
- A thug or bodyguard in Brazil.
- She saw six armed riders: she could tell, by the way they were dressed and by the clearly visible brand of the same hacienda on the flanks of all their horses, that they were capangas and not cangaceiros or Rural Police.1984, Mario Vargas Llosa, translated by Helen R. Lane, The War of the End of the World, Folio Society, published 2012, page 208
- He had never actually killed a man, though the peasants spoke of at least ten sent to their graves by Joazinho, a reputation the capanga did nothing to discourage.1986, Errol Lincoln Uys, Brazil, page 730
Forms of capanga
| plural | capangas |
|---|
Origin of capanga
From Brazilian Portuguese capanga.
Questions about capanga
- What does capanga mean?
- Capanga means a thug or bodyguard in Brazil.
- What part of speech is capanga?
- Capanga is a noun.
- What is the plural of capanga?
- The plural of capanga is capangas.
Words near capanga in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: capanga (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: “capanga.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/capanga. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.