Word.ws English Dictionary

Jenga

/ˈd͡ʒɛŋɡə/

Jenga proper noun: a game where players take turns removing wooden blocks from a stack formed brickwise, the loser being the player whose actions cause the tower to collapse.

jenga: a game where players take turns removing wooden blocks from a stack formed brickwise, the loser...
Image: Guma89, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Proper noun

Jenga

  1. A game where players take turns removing wooden blocks from a stack formed brickwise, the loser being the player whose actions cause the tower to collapse.
    • With a soft-pronged gripper, external camera and force-sensing wrist cuff, the robot can both see and feel individual blocks in a Jenga tower, according to an MIT statement.2019 January 31, Jack Guy, “This robot could beat you at Jenga”, in CNN, archived from the original on 28 Nov 2022
  2. (figuratively) Any activity that involves great precision with a risk of great failure.

Origin of Jenga

Borrowed from Swahili -jenga (“to construct, to build”).

Questions about Jenga

What does Jenga mean?
Jenga means a game where players take turns removing wooden blocks from a stack formed brickwise, the loser being the player whose actions cause the tower to collapse.
What part of speech is Jenga?
Jenga is a proper noun.
How do you pronounce Jenga?
Jenga is pronounced /ˈd͡ʒɛŋɡə/.

Words near Jenga in the dictionary

  1. Jeneroux
  2. Jenessa
  3. jenever
  4. jenevers
  5. Jeng
  6. Jenga
  7. jengkol
  8. Jenglish
  9. Jengs
  10. Jenifer
  11. Jenifers

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: Jenga (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:

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