Word.ws English Dictionary

pacu jawi

pacu jawi noun: a traditional bull race in the Tanah Datar region of West Sumatra, Indonesia, where jockeys cling to a wooden plow attached to a pair of bulls, racing across muddy, harvested rice paddies to showcase their cattle's strength and speed, serving as a cultural festival and a way to boost the value of the bulls for sale. The crowd often decides on the best performers.

pacu jawi: a traditional bull race in the Tanah Datar region of West Sumatra, Indonesia, where jockeys cling...
Image: DEBA PRASAD ROY, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

Noun

pacu jawi

  1. (Indonesian) A traditional bull race in the Tanah Datar region of West Sumatra, Indonesia, where jockeys cling to a wooden plow attached to a pair of bulls, racing across muddy, harvested rice paddies to showcase their cattle's strength and speed, serving as a cultural festival and a way to boost the value of the bulls for sale. The crowd often decides on the best performers.

Origin of pacu jawi

Borrowed from Indonesian pacu jawi; pacu + jawi, literally meaning "bull race".

Questions about pacu jawi

What does pacu jawi mean?
Pacu jawi means a traditional bull race in the Tanah Datar region of West Sumatra, Indonesia, where jockeys cling to a wooden plow attached to a pair of bulls, racing across muddy, harvested rice paddies to showcase their cattle's strength and speed, serving as a cultural festival and a way to boost the value of the bulls for sale. The crowd often decides on the best performers.
What part of speech is pacu jawi?
Pacu jawi is a noun.

Words near pacu jawi in the dictionary

  1. Pactolus
  2. pacts
  3. pactum de non petendo
  4. pactum illicitum
  5. pacu
  6. pacu jawi
  7. Pacupac
  8. pacus
  9. pacuvirus
  10. pacuviruses
  11. pacy

Source and license

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