Word.ws English Dictionary

lobola

UK/ˈləʊbələ/

lobola noun: the bride price among certain Bantu peoples of South Africa.

Noun

lobola (countable and uncountable, plural lobolas)

  1. (South Africa) The bride price among certain Bantu peoples of South Africa.
    • The cattle of the second kaffir had been obtained from the first kaffir as lobola; all (three) have died from the disease.1901 June 21, “The Rinderpest Outbreak”, in The Agricultural Journal and Mining Record, volume 4, number 8
    • Some must give up their ground for trees, and some for pastures. And hardest of all would be the custom of lobola, by which a man pays for his wife in cattle, for people kept too many cattle for this purpose, and counted all their wealth in cattle, so that the grass had no chance to recover.1948, Alan Paton, chapter 33, in Cry, the Beloved Country, New York: Scribner, page 253
    Antonyms:
    dowry

Examples of lobola in a sentence

  • All the money he'd brought with him had gone into lobola – the dowry for a wife […].1979, André Brink, A Dry White Season, Vintage, published 1998, page 38:
  • My sister Baliwe, who was older than Mabel, had been engaged to be married, and lobola had already been paid.1994, Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom: The Autobiography of Nelson Mandela, London: Abacus, published 2010, page 213:

Antonyms of lobola

Forms of lobola

plurallobolas

Origin of lobola

From Xhosa lobola, Zulu lobola (“pay dowry”).

Questions about lobola

What does lobola mean?
Lobola means the bride price among certain Bantu peoples of South Africa.
How do you use lobola in a sentence?
All the money he'd brought with him had gone into lobola – the dowry for a wife […].
What part of speech is lobola?
Lobola is a noun.
How do you pronounce lobola?
Lobola is pronounced /ˈləʊbələ/ (UK).
What is the plural of lobola?
The plural of lobola is lobolas.

Words near lobola in the dictionary

  1. loblolly trees
  2. loblollying
  3. lobo
  4. Loboc
  5. Loboda
  6. lobola
  7. lobolas
  8. lobolo
  9. lobolos
  10. lobomycosis
  11. lobomycotic

Source and license

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