Word.ws English Dictionary

machi

machi noun: a traditional healer and religious leader in the Mapuche culture of Chile and Argentina.

Noun

machi (plural machis)

  1. A traditional healer and religious leader in the Mapuche culture of Chile and Argentina.
    • Many Mapuche women in La Pintana often went without health care because they did not trust conventional Western medicine or feared discrimination in public health clinics, and traveling hundreds of miles to see a machi in their communities of origin was impractical.2015 August 19, Pascale Bonnefoy, “Alongside a Doctor’s Care, a Dose of Traditional Healing”, in New York Times

Proper noun capitalized: Machi

Machi (plural Machis)

  1. A surname.

Forms of machi

Noun
pluralmachis
Proper noun
pluralMachis

Origin of machi

Borrowed from Mapudungun maci.

Two possible origins: * Borrowed from Italian Machi or Machì, a surname of unexplained origin. * Borrowed from Japanese 真地 (Machi), an uncommon surname in Japan.

Questions about machi

What does machi mean?
Machi means a traditional healer and religious leader in the Mapuche culture of Chile and Argentina.
What part of speech is machi?
Machi can be a noun or a proper noun.
What is the plural of machi?
The plural of machi is machis.

Words near machi in the dictionary

  1. macheteros
  2. machetes
  3. macheting
  4. machhan
  5. machhans
  6. machi
  7. machiam
  8. Machian
  9. Machias
  10. Machias Seal Island
  11. Machiasport

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: machi (page history and authors); Machi (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: “machi.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/machi. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.