Word.ws English Dictionary

mongo

More pronunciations (1)Fewer pronunciations

Philippines/ˈmoŋ.ɡo/

mongo noun: still-usable things salvaged (by sanmen) from garbage. Also the clipping of mongoloid.

Noun (1)

mongo (uncountable)

  1. (New-York-City) Still-usable things salvaged (by sanmen) from garbage.
    • The old room was furnished in "mongo," Sanit lingo for stuff picked out of the garbage. Mongo-picking, Ukeles explained, "is against the law. The garbage belongs to the City. But until a recent rehabilitation program, which is the first since the Depression, the Sanmen never had their own...1984, [NYC] Issue 1-6, page 51
    • [Mongo] refers to trash, or more specifically, to treasure found in trash: books, artifacts, furniture, even food. Ted Botha's book explores a whole culture, and various subcultures, that revolve around mongo. Those obsessed with mongo often live on the margins, […]2006, Fine Books & Collections, volume 4, page 56, reviewing MONGO: Adventures in Trash by Ted Botha (2004)
  2. A manner of pushing oneself on a skateboard with one's front foot as opposed to one's back foot.
    • push mongo

Noun (2)

mongo (uncountable)

  1. (Philippines) A mung bean.

Noun (3) capitalized: MONGO

MONGO (plural MONGOs)

  1. (abbreviation, acronym) Acronym of my own NGO.

Proper noun capitalized: Mongo

Mongo

  1. A Bantu language spoken in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Also used as

mongo is also the clipping of mongoloid.

Examples of mongo in a sentence

  • The old room was furnished in "mongo," Sanit lingo for stuff picked out of the garbage.1984, [NYC] Issue 1-6, page 51
  • Loading out on house-to-house can take many hours, but such routes have other perks, especially for someone who likes to mongo.2013, Robin Nagle, Picking Up: On the Streets and Behind the Trucks, →ISBN:

Synonyms of mongo

Forms of mongo

pluralmongos
alternative formmungo
alternative formmonggo
pluralMONGOs

Origin of mongo

Unknown

Borrowed from Spanish mongo . Compare Tagalog munggo. Doublet of mung.

Words formed from mongo

Phrases with mongo

Questions about mongo

What does mongo mean?
Mongo means still-usable things salvaged (by sanmen) from garbage.
How do you use mongo in a sentence?
The old room was furnished in "mongo," Sanit lingo for stuff picked out of the garbage.
What part of speech is mongo?
Mongo can be a noun or a proper noun.
How do you pronounce mongo?
Mongo is pronounced /ˈmoŋ.ɡo/ (Philippines).
What is the plural of mongo?
The plural of mongo is mongos.

Words near mongo in the dictionary

  1. Mongiellos
  2. Mongillo
  3. Mongillos
  4. monging out
  5. Mongkok
  6. mongo
  7. mongo bean
  8. mongo beans
  9. mongoe
  10. Mongogarie
  11. mongol

Source and license

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