Word.ws English Dictionary

carioca

carioca noun: a sideways step in which one leg crosses over the other. Also the alternative form of Carioca.

Noun (1)

carioca (plural cariocas)

  1. A sideways step in which one leg crosses over the other.
    • In the final phase, the athlete works in non-cleated shoes on starts, stops, jumps, rounded side-step cuts, and crossover cuts, advancing to hard 90° cuts, and running tighter and tighter figures-of-eight. Defensive backs run sideways and backward and perform carioca (crossover) steps.1982, Arthur J. Helfet, Disorders of the knee, page 388
    • These included the cocontraction maneuver (a shuffling maneuver around a semicircle while tethered to surgical tubing), a carioca (crossover stepping), and a shuttle run (an acceleration and deceleration test).2006, Michael L. Voight, Barbara J. Hoogenboom, William E. Prentice, Musculoskeletal Interventions: Techniques for Therapeutic Exercise, →ISBN

Noun (2) capitalized: Carioca

Carioca (plural Cariocas)

  1. A native or inhabitant of the city of Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro state, Brazil
    • Needless to say, a true Carioca never makes mistakes when dealing with money.2008, Priscilla Goslin, How to Be a Carioca: The Alternative Guide for the Tourist in Rio, →ISBN, page 43
    • I was impassioned about this because my Portuguese professor at Johns Hopkins was a Carioca, or native of Rio de Janeiro, and the first thing she told us in class was that she was going to make us all Cariocas.2012, Katherine Losse, The Boy Kings: A Journey into the Heart of the Social Network, →ISBN

Proper noun capitalized: Carioca

Carioca

  1. A river in Rio de Janeiro state, Brazil; in full, the Carioca River.

Also used as

carioca is also the alternative form of Carioca.

Forms of carioca

pluralcariocas
pluralCariocas
alternative formcarioca

Origin of carioca

Borrowed from Portuguese carioca.

Borrowed from Brazilian Portuguese carioca.

Borrowed from Brazilian Portuguese Carioca.

Questions about carioca

What does carioca mean?
Carioca means a sideways step in which one leg crosses over the other.
What part of speech is carioca?
Carioca can be a noun or a proper noun.
What is the plural of carioca?
The plural of carioca is cariocas.

Words near carioca in the dictionary

  1. carinulae
  2. carinulate
  3. carinule
  4. carinules
  5. cario-
  6. carioca
  7. cariocas
  8. cariogen
  9. cariogenesis
  10. cariogenic
  11. cariogenicity

Source and license

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