Matatu
noun ·Rare ·Advanced level
Definitions
- 1 A minivan used as a shared taxi, especially one operating without a licence. Kenya, Uganda
"A matatu is also more profitable when driven by its owner than by an employed driver, or if the employee-driver pays in all the earnings and the owner meets the operating costs, rather than when the owner demands a fixed sum of money daily, with the operator keeping the surplus."
Synonyms
All synonymsExample
More examples"A matatu is also more profitable when driven by its owner than by an employed driver, or if the employee-driver pays in all the earnings and the owner meets the operating costs, rather than when the owner demands a fixed sum of money daily, with the operator keeping the surplus."
Etymology
From Swahili matatu, a clipping of mapeni matatu (“thirty cents”, literally “three ten-cent coins”), the flat fare paid for such transportation in the 1960s. The word matatu is from ma- (prefix forming plurals) + -tatu (“three”) (from Proto-Bantu *-tátʊ̀ (“three”)).
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More for "matatu"
Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.