Tamale

//təˈmɑː.liː// name, noun

name, noun ·Rare ·Advanced level

Definitions

Noun
  1. 1
    A Mexican dish of cornmeal dough shell filled with various ingredients (e.g. chopped beef, pork, sweet filling) then steamed in corn husks.

    "She would peel back the husk, ladle over the salsa verde, stab a plastic fork straight down into the heart of the masa, and hand the tamale over to me."

  2. 2
    dough stuffed with a meat mixture and sometimes wrapped in corn husks and steamed wordnet
Proper Noun
  1. 1
    A city in Ghana, the capital city of the Northern Region.

Synonyms

All synonyms
tamalhumitahumitatamal

Example

More examples

"She would peel back the husk, ladle over the salsa verde, stab a plastic fork straight down into the heart of the masa, and hand the tamale over to me."

Etymology

Back-formation from the plural tamales, derived from Latin American Spanish tamales, plural of tamal, derived from Nahuatl tamalli (“wrapped”), derived from Proto-Uto-Aztecan *tïmaL-. Compare O'odham cemait (“tortilla”), Hopi tuma (“stone griddle for cooking corn flatbread”), Ute tʉ'ma- (“to roast under ashes”).

Related phrases

big tamalehot tamaletamale pie

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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.