Word.ws English Dictionary

tamales

tamales is the plural of tamal.

tamales is the plural of tamale.

Meaning of tamale

Noun

tamale (plural tamales)

  1. A Mexican dish of cornmeal dough shell filled with various ingredients (e.g. chopped beef, pork, sweet filling) then steamed in corn husks.
    • She would peel back the husk, ladle over the salsa verde, stab a plastic fork straight down into the heart of the masa, and hand the tamale over to me.2023, Justin Torres, Blackouts, Granta Books (2024), pages 70-71
    Synonyms:
    humita, tamal

See all 2 meanings of tamale

Origin of tamales

From Spanish tamales. As the plural of tamale, partly also regularly formed from tamale + -s.

Phrases with tamales

Questions about tamales

What is tamales the plural of?
Tamales is the plural of tamal.

Words near tamales in the dictionary

  1. tamale pies
  2. tamalera
  3. tamaleras
  4. tamalero
  5. tamaleros
  6. tamales
  7. tamalin
  8. tamalito
  9. tamalitos
  10. Tamalpais
  11. Tamalpais-Homestead Valley

Source and license

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