Word.ws English Dictionary

griot

/ˈɡɹi.oʊ/

griot noun: a West African storyteller who passes on oral traditions; a wandering musician and poet.

Noun (1)

griot (plural griots)

  1. A West African storyteller who passes on oral traditions; a wandering musician and poet.
    • Griots may be the chroniclers of an important family or of a group of people — like the Bambara hunters’ griot — or itinerant poets and musicians who extol the praises of the person who has hired them for a special festivity.1995, Françoise Pfaff, “Sembene, A Griot of Modern Times”, in Michael T. Martin, editor, Cinemas of the Black Diaspora: Diversity, Dependence, and Oppositionality, page 118
    • When ethnographers are asked to read their works to gatherings of Songhay, elders, they, too, are considered griots.
      Ethnographers, however, usually consider themselves scholars, not griots. They prepare themselves for their life's work in a manner altogether different from that of the griot.1997, Paul Stoller, Sensuous Scholarship, page 15

Noun (2)

griot (countable and uncountable, plural griots)

  1. A Haitian dish of fried pork.

Examples of griot in a sentence

  • I decided that it would be better for a griot to take us back into the legend, rather than me, a contemporary man.2003, Melissa Thackway, “Interview I: Adama Drabo, director”, in Africa Shoots Back: Alternative Perspectives in Sub-Saharan Francophone...
  • In oral cultures, bards carried epics in their heads; griots could reel off centuries of genealogy on demand.2025 October 26, Kwame Anthony Appiah, “The Age of De-Skilling”, in The Atlantic:

Forms of griot

pluralgriots

Origin of griot

Borrowed from French griot.

French griot

Words formed from griot

Questions about griot

What does griot mean?
Griot means a West African storyteller who passes on oral traditions; a wandering musician and poet.
How do you use griot in a sentence?
I decided that it would be better for a griot to take us back into the legend, rather than me, a contemporary man.
What part of speech is griot?
Griot is a noun.
How do you pronounce griot?
Griot is pronounced /ˈɡɹi.oʊ/.
What is the plural of griot?
The plural of griot is griots.

Words near griot in the dictionary

  1. grinworthy
  2. Grinzo
  3. Grinăuți
  4. Grinăuți-Moldova
  5. Grințieș
  6. griot
  7. griotic
  8. griots
  9. griotte
  10. griottes
  11. grip

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: griot (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: “griot.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/griot. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.