Word.ws English Dictionary

iimbongi

iimbongi is the plural of imbongi.

Meaning of imbongi

Noun

imbongi (plural izimbongi or iimbongi or imbongis)

  1. (South Africa) A praise singer, a traditional bard in Zulu culture.
    • Let us consider the contemporary oral poetry of the Xhosa Bantu[…], and its highest form, the praise-poetry of male tradents, who were attached until recently to tribal chiefs. The tradents are imbongi ‘praise poets’ and the genre of their work is the izibongo ‘praise poem.’ “The lines of the...1980, M. O'Connor, “Hebrew Verse Structure”, in Hebrew Verse Structure, Winona Lake, Ind.: Eisenbrauns, published 1997, →ISBN, section 1.7.2 (Constriction in Other Languages), page 157

Origin of iimbongi

Borrowed from Xhosa iimbongi, from iim- + imbongi.

Questions about iimbongi

What is iimbongi the plural of?
Iimbongi is the plural of imbongi.

Words near iimbongi in the dictionary

  1. IIIT
  2. IIITian
  3. IIITians
  4. IIITs
  5. IIM
  6. iimbongi
  7. IIMite
  8. IIMites
  9. IIMs
  10. IIN
  11. IInd

Source and license

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