lavalava
lavalava noun: an everyday item of clothing traditionally worn by Polynesians and other Oceanic peoples, consisting of a single rectangular cloth worn as a skirt, secured around the waist by an overhand knotting of the upper corners.
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Noun
lavalava (plural lavalavas or lavalava)
- An everyday item of clothing traditionally worn by Polynesians and other Oceanic peoples, consisting of a single rectangular cloth worn as a skirt, secured around the waist by an overhand knotting of the upper corners.
- Some tourists buy Samoan identity merchandise as novelties, but most prefer sloganless items such as printed lavalavas.1997, Michel Picard, Robert Everett Wood, Tourism, ethnicity, and the state in Asian and Pacific societies
- The guy she went out with was named Ziki Fuapopo, and the story she told involved his mother, a pile of cocaine, and a group of men dressed in lavalavas.2001, David Sedaris, diary entry January 22, in Theft by Finding, Back Bay Books 2017, p. 436
Forms of lavalava
| plural | lavalavas |
|---|---|
| plural | lavalava |
Origin of lavalava
Borrowed from Samoan lava-lava.
Words that rhyme with lavalava
Questions about lavalava
- What does lavalava mean?
- Lavalava means an everyday item of clothing traditionally worn by Polynesians and other Oceanic peoples, consisting of a single rectangular cloth worn as a skirt, secured around the waist by an overhand knotting of the upper corners.
- What part of speech is lavalava?
- Lavalava is a noun.
- What is the plural of lavalava?
- The plural of lavalava is lavalavas.
Words near lavalava in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: lavalava (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: “lavalava.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/lavalava. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.