Word.ws English Dictionary

maracatu

maracatu noun: a Brazilian performance genre from Pernambuco involving parades and music.

Noun

maracatu (uncountable)

  1. A Brazilian performance genre from Pernambuco involving parades and music.
    • Nation Beat, from exotic Brooklyn, uses the maracatu beat and rabeca fiddle of northeastern Brazil, and it has a Brazilian singer, Liliana Araújo.2008 January 15, Jon Pareles, “To See (and Hear) the World in Five Hours: Unique Sounds Ripe for Import”, in New York Times

Origin of maracatu

Borrowed from Brazilian Portuguese maracatu, from Old Tupi maraká (“rattle, maraca”) + katu (“good”).

Questions about maracatu

What does maracatu mean?
Maracatu means a Brazilian performance genre from Pernambuco involving parades and music.
What part of speech is maracatu?
Maracatu is a noun.

Words near maracatu in the dictionary

  1. Maracaibo
  2. maracaist
  3. maracaists
  4. Maracanaço
  5. maracas
  6. maracatu
  7. Maracay
  8. Maracle
  9. Maracles
  10. maracock
  11. maracocks

Source and license

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