Word.ws English Dictionary

urucum

urucum noun: achiote.

Noun

urucum (uncountable)

  1. Achiote.
    • Martius found most dressed in bits of clothing, their hair wildly tangled and their faces dyed red with urucum.2006, William Bryant, The Birds of Paradise: Alfred Russel Wallace: a Life, page 67
    • They paint them, or at least parts of them, with urucum (reddish) plant dye or even their own blood if there are no urucum plants nearby.2012, Daniel Everett, Language: The Cultural Tool, Profile, published 2013, page 122

Origin of urucum

Borrowed from Portuguese urucum, borrowed from Old Tupi uruku, from Proto-Tupi-Guarani *uruku, from Proto-Tupian *ɨrʲuku.

Questions about urucum

What does urucum mean?
Urucum means achiote.
What part of speech is urucum?
Urucum is a noun.

Words near urucum in the dictionary

  1. Uru.
  2. urubu
  3. urubus
  4. Urubú-Kaapor
  5. urucu
  6. urucum
  7. urucuri
  8. urucuri palm
  9. urucuri palms
  10. urucuri-iba
  11. urucuris

Source and license

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