tamale.
A Mexican dish of cornmeal dough shell filled with various ingredients (e.g. chopped beef, pork, sweet filling) then steamed in corn husks.
Meaning & usage
A Mexican dish of cornmeal dough shell filled with various ingredients (e.g. chopped beef, pork, sweet filling) then steamed in corn husks.
Where this word comes from
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”).
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Definitions, grammatical labels, IPA, etymology and examples: Wiktionary contributors, extracted by Kaikki / Wiktextract. Adapted under CC BY-SA 4.0. Selected fields and authored examples are shown; third-party quotations and audio are omitted. See contributor history.
Last enriched 2026-09-10. Definitions are in English. Romanizations are shown when supplied by the source; syllable estimates are omitted for unsupported scripts.