Word of the Day:
reggae
What It Means
A music genre that originated in Jamaica in the late 1960s and is heavily associated with Rastafarianism, featuring a heavy bass line and percussive rhythm guitar on the offbeat, often with close vocal harmonies.
Near-synonym: (earlier) bluebeat
Reggae in Context
“I want to do the reggay with you / Come onto me, do the dance”
Did You Know?
From Jamaican Creole rege (“rags; a quarrel”), see rag; originally used in the 1960s to describe a Jamaican dance. Compare ragtime. Broader musical sense popularized by the 1968 Maytals song “Do the Reggay”.
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: reggae (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws chose the word and reformatted its meaning, examples and origin.
Cite this entry: “reggae.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/reggae. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.
