Word.ws English Dictionary

tambiolo

tambiolo noun: a fish bowl or barrel-shaped container where balls used in a raffle or a lottery are placed. In the case of a raffle, tickets may also be used. Can be made out of wire, glass, clear plastic, etc. Often has a handle, which, when rotated, mixes up the balls or tickets.

tambiolo: a fish bowl or barrel-shaped container where balls used in a raffle or a lottery are placed. In the...
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Noun

tambiolo (plural tambiolos)

  1. (Philippines) A fish bowl or barrel-shaped container where balls used in a raffle or a lottery are placed. In the case of a raffle, tickets may also be used. Can be made out of wire, glass, clear plastic, etc. Often has a handle, which, when rotated, mixes up the balls or tickets.
    • The lottery during the time of José Rizal used the traditional manually operated tambiolo where numbers were drawn for the winning combinations.2010 November 30, Perseus Echeminada, “Rizal a lottery winner in 1892”, in The Philippine Star, retrieved 25 Jun 2020
    • A few days ago, the Manila police raided one such bingo game in the Blumentritt area. The police grabbed pieces of evidence, such as the tambiolo from which the winning numbers are taken, and cards, in the process of which there was a scuffle and the uniform of a policeman and the T-shirt of a...2013 February 19, Neal H. Cruz, “Is bingo an illegal numbers game or not?”, in Philippine Daily Inquirer, retrieved 25 Jun 2020
    Synonyms:
    raffle drum, bingo drum, lottery drum
  2. (Philippines, chiefly political) A system by which the government gives out assets, such as land, supposedly at random, but which some feel is actually rigged.
    • The “tambiolo land reform” in the Cojuangco- and Aquino-owned Hacienda Luisita sugar estate is a fraud and the fact that the lawyer of the estate is defending the process is sufficient proof that former Agrarian Reform secretary Virgilio Delos Reyes was conniving with the landowners.2016 July 5, Sandy Araneta, “‘Tambiolo land reform’ slammed”, in The Manila Standard, retrieved 25 Jun 2020
    • Through a dubious “tambiolo” method, 5,718 Certificates of Land Ownership (CLOA) were distributed to farmers.2016, Arnisson Andre Ortega, “The Business of Building a Nation”, in Neoliberalizing Spaces in the Philippines: Suburbanization, Transnational Migration, and Dispossession, Lexington Books (Rowman &...

Synonyms of tambiolo

Forms of tambiolo

pluraltambiolos
alternative formtambola

Origin of tambiolo

Borrowed from Philippine Spanish tambiolo, from tambo + -i- + Italian -olo. See also Spanish tómbola, which is also from Italian tombola. Compare Tagalog tambiyolo.

Questions about tambiolo

What does tambiolo mean?
Tambiolo means a fish bowl or barrel-shaped container where balls used in a raffle or a lottery are placed. In the case of a raffle, tickets may also be used. Can be made out of wire, glass, clear plastic, etc. Often has a handle, which, when rotated, mixes up the balls or tickets.
What part of speech is tambiolo?
Tambiolo is a noun.
What is the plural of tambiolo?
The plural of tambiolo is tambiolos.

Words near tambiolo in the dictionary

  1. tamberan
  2. tamberans
  3. Tambidao
  4. Tambilagao
  5. Tambingan
  6. tambiolo
  7. tambiolos
  8. Tambis
  9. Tambisan
  10. Tamblin
  11. Tambling

Source and license

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