Assegai
noun, verb ·Rare ·Advanced level
Definitions
- 1 A slim hardwood spear or javelin with an iron tip, especially those used by Bantu peoples of Southern Africa.
"But now the Moormen, stalking o'er the strand / to guard the wat'ery stores the strangers need; / this, targe on arm and assegai in hand, / that, with his bended bow, and venom'd reed[.]"
- 2 the slender spear of the Bantu-speaking people of Africa wordnet
- 3 The tree species Curtisia dentata, the wood of which is traditionally used to make assegais.
"In the clearing, built around the base of an assegai tree, stood a hut, plastered in cow dung."
- 1 To spear with an assegai.
Synonyms
All synonymsExample
More examples"But now the Moormen, stalking o'er the strand / to guard the wat'ery stores the strangers need; / this, targe on arm and assegai in hand, / that, with his bended bow, and venom'd reed[.]"
Etymology
From French azagaie (now zagaie) or Portuguese azagaia, Spanish azagaya, and later in the forms that have become most common borrowed from Afrikaans assegaai, from colloquial Arabic اَلزَّغَايَة (az-zaḡāya), from Proto-Berber *zaġāya (“spear”).
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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.