Word.ws English Dictionary

tagati

tagati noun: in South African English, a wizard, witch, or a spiteful person who operates in secret to harm others or who uses poisons and familiar spirits to carry out harmful deeds.

Noun

tagati (uncountable)

  1. In South African English, a wizard, witch, or a spiteful person who operates in secret to harm others or who uses poisons and familiar spirits to carry out harmful deeds.
    • No, the average Bantu always had a dilemma; live with the wild tribes and never know when some witchdoctor's tagati would strike him down; or live with the umlungus and respect his authority (and his sjambok).1992, Colin Bender, Makapan odyssey, page 166

Origin of tagati

The term is first recorded in 1836; it derives from the Zulu word umthakathi, being someone who mixes medicine, which itself comes from the Zulu thaka (mix) and muthi (medicine). The term has gradually come to be used to refer only to negative, harmful uses of medicines derived from plants, animals and minerals.

Questions about tagati

What does tagati mean?
Tagati means in South African English, a wizard, witch, or a spiteful person who operates in secret to harm others or who uses poisons and familiar spirits to carry out harmful deeds.
What part of speech is tagati?
Tagati is a noun.

Words near tagati in the dictionary

  1. Taganghin
  2. Taganrog
  3. Tagapul-an
  4. tagasaste
  5. Tagata Pasifika
  6. tagati
  7. tagatose
  8. tagatoses
  9. Tagawa
  10. Tagaytay
  11. Tagba-o

Source and license

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