Word.ws English Dictionary

Laba Festival

Laba Festival proper noun: a moveable Chinese festival day occurring between December 30th and January 28th on the Gregorian calendar, historically variously associated with propitiatory end-of-year sacrifices, ancestral veneration, and the Enlightenment of the Buddha, now chiefly observed by the consumption of Laba porridge.

Proper noun

the Laba Festival

  1. A moveable Chinese festival day occurring between December 30th and January 28th on the Gregorian calendar, historically variously associated with propitiatory end-of-year sacrifices, ancestral veneration, and the Enlightenment of the Buddha, now chiefly observed by the consumption of Laba porridge.
    • The Laba congee is generally eaten on the eighth day of the 12th month in the lunar calendar as part of the Laba Festival. Like Buddha’s delight, it has become a food item that can be eaten at any time of the year.2019 April 5, Novella Lui, “Is it vegan? 7 Chinese dishes that are completely plant-based”, in South China Morning Post, →ISSN, →OCLC, archived from the original on 18 May 2022, Style / Leisure

Forms of Laba Festival

alternative formLaba
alternative formLaba festival

Origin of Laba Festival

A partial calque of the Mandarin form of Chinese 臘八節 /腊八节 (Làbājié), named for its occurrence on the 8th day (八) of the 12th month of the traditional Chinese lunisolar calendar, sometimes known by the name Là (臘月) from an ancient end-of-year sacrifice.

Questions about Laba Festival

What does Laba Festival mean?
Laba Festival means a moveable Chinese festival day occurring between December 30th and January 28th on the Gregorian calendar, historically variously associated with propitiatory end-of-year sacrifices, ancestral veneration, and the Enlightenment of the Buddha, now chiefly observed by the consumption of Laba porridge.
What part of speech is Laba Festival?
Laba Festival is a proper noun.

Words near Laba Festival in the dictionary

  1. lab-rat
  2. lab-rats
  3. lab.
  4. Laba
  5. Laba congee
  6. Laba Festival
  7. Laba porridge
  8. Labadie
  9. Labadies
  10. Labadism
  11. Labadist

Source and license

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