Word.ws English Dictionary

kum ba yah

kum ba yah is the alternative spelling of kumbaya.

Meaning of kumbaya

Noun

kumbaya

  1. Used to evoke spiritual unity and interpersonal harmony, with varying degrees of sincerity or sarcasm, as referring to the folk song.
    • Dr. Hoffman told me the word kumbaya was originally an African American spiritual, a song that was also a prayer asking for divine intervention, asking for help in dire times, and that then the hippies in the sixties took it and sang it to mean unity amid protest, and then it got played out and...2024, Tommy Orange, Wandering Stars, Harvill Secker, page 163

Questions about kum ba yah

What is kum ba yah the alternative spelling of?
Kum ba yah is the alternative spelling of kumbaya.

Words near kum ba yah in the dictionary

  1. Kulwin
  2. Kulykiv
  3. Kulzer
  4. Kulzers
  5. Kum
  6. kum ba yah
  7. Kum Nye
  8. Kumada
  9. Kumadas
  10. Kumagawa
  11. Kumagawas

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: kum ba yah (page history and authors); kumbaya (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: “kum ba yah.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/kum_ba_yah. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.