Word.ws English Dictionary

Zamboanga

More pronunciations (1)Fewer pronunciations

/zɐmbˈwaŋ.ɡɐ/

Zamboanga proper noun: zamboanga City (a city in Zamboanga Peninsula, Mindanao, Philippines).

zamboanga: zamboanga City (a city in Zamboanga Peninsula, Mindanao, Philippines)
Image: Pedro Murillo Velarde, Nicolás de la Cruz Bagay and, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Proper noun

Zamboanga

  1. Zamboanga City (a city in Zamboanga Peninsula, Mindanao, Philippines)
  2. Zamboanga Peninsula (an administrative region of Mindanao, Philippines).
  3. Zamboanga peninsula (a peninsula in Mindanao, Philippines).
  4. Province of Zamboanga (a former province of Mindanao, Philippines)
  5. (historical) The Republic of Zamboanga, a short-lived revolutionary republic, founded after the collapse of Spanish colonial rule in the Philippines, existing between May and November 1899.

Zamboanga meaning in Tagalog

Zamboanga in Tagalog

city in the Philippines
Zamboanga

Origin of Zamboanga

From Spanish Zamboanga, from Central Sama Samboangan (“mooring place”), from sambuwang (“large mooring post”) + -an (locative suffix). The root is cognate with Malay sembuang (“large mooring post”). The original etymon is attested in the Velarde map (1734). A popular folk etymology may also attribute it to Malay jambangan (“flower garden”), from jambang (“flower pot”) + -an (locative suffix), but this name has never been attested in any historical records prior to the 1960s with the place being historically attested usually instead as "Samboangan".

Words formed from Zamboanga

Phrases with Zamboanga

Questions about Zamboanga

What does Zamboanga mean?
Zamboanga means zamboanga City (a city in Zamboanga Peninsula, Mindanao, Philippines).
What is Zamboanga in Tagalog?
Zamboanga in Tagalog is Zamboanga. See Zamboanga meaning in Tagalog.
What part of speech is Zamboanga?
Zamboanga is a proper noun.
How do you pronounce Zamboanga?
Zamboanga is pronounced /zɐmbˈwaŋ.ɡɐ/ (Philippines).

Words near Zamboanga in the dictionary

  1. zambianoliangioticaloigisticologphobia
  2. Zambians
  3. Zambito
  4. Zambitos
  5. zambo
  6. Zamboanga
  7. Zamboanga Chavacano
  8. Zamboanga City
  9. Zamboanga del Norte
  10. Zamboanga del Sur
  11. Zamboanga Peninsula

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: Zamboanga (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.

Last updated:

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Mlgc1998-Zamboanga.wav.

Cite this entry: “Zamboanga.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/zamboanga. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.