Word.ws English Dictionary

desnuda

Syllables: des·nu·da/dɛsˈnuːdɑ/US/dɛsˈnudɑ/

desnuda noun: a topless female street performer covered in body paint who poses for photographs in exchange for tips in the pedestrian plaza of New York City's Times Square.

desnuda: a topless female street performer covered in body paint who poses for photographs in exchange for...
Image: Steven Pisano, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Noun

desnuda (plural desnudas)

  1. (US) A topless female street performer covered in body paint who poses for photographs in exchange for tips in the pedestrian plaza of New York City's Times Square.
    • She shielded her nipples until they were cloaked with brush strokes[.] […] This was part of Ms. Ovalles’s daily routine as a desnuda, a Spanish word meaning naked that has been embraced by the women who strut around the Times Square pedestrian plaza topless and covered in body paint to pose for...2015 August 14, Collen Wright, “The Desnudas of Times Square, Topless but for the Paint”, in The New York Times
    • Muslims, and a number of Americans alike, would be alarmed with some of the street performers found in New York's Times Square, especially the daily routine of desnudas.2017, Tim Delaney, Social Deviance

Forms of desnuda

pluraldesnudas

Origin of desnuda

Borrowed from Spanish desnuda, the feminine singular of desnudo (“naked, nude, undressed”), ultimately from Latin nūdus (“naked, nude, undressed”) and Proto-Indo-European *negʷ- (“bare, naked”).

Questions about desnuda

What does desnuda mean?
Desnuda means a topless female street performer covered in body paint who poses for photographs in exchange for tips in the pedestrian plaza of New York City's Times Square.
What part of speech is desnuda?
Desnuda is a noun.
How do you pronounce desnuda?
Desnuda is pronounced /dɛsˈnuːdɑ/ (UK).
What is the plural of desnuda?
The plural of desnuda is desnudas.

Words near desnuda in the dictionary

  1. desnowed
  2. desnowing
  3. desnows
  4. Desnoyers
  5. Desnoyerses
  6. desnuda
  7. desnudas
  8. DESNZ
  9. deso
  10. desobliteration
  11. desobliterations

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: desnuda (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.

Last updated:

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

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