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Tabu   Listen
noun
Taboo  n.  (Written also tabu)  A total prohibition of intercourse with, use of, or approach to, a given person or thing under pain of death, an interdict of religious origin and authority, formerly common in the islands of Polynesia; interdiction.


Tabu  n., v.  See Taboo.


adjective
Taboo  adj.  (Written also tabu and tapu)  Set apart or sacred by religious custom among certain races of Polynesia, New Zealand, etc., and forbidden to certain persons or uses; hence, prohibited under severe penalties; interdicted; as, food, places, words, customs, etc., may be taboo.


verb
Taboo  v. t.  (past & past part. tabooed; pres. part. tabooing)  (Written also tabu)  To put under taboo; to forbid, or to forbid the use of; to interdict approach to, or use of; as, to taboo the ground set apart as a sanctuary for criminals.





Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48


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"Tabu" Quotes from Famous Books



... rule was that a man could not marry a woman of his mother's totem. When the change to male descent took place, the mother's totem, as we see by actual examples[135], did not lose the respect which it formerly enjoyed; there is in more than one tribe a tabu of the mother's as well as of the father's totem. That being so, it is natural to suppose that the new marriage organisation according to male descent might be modified to take account of this fact. By dividing the classes and arranging that one ...
— Kinship Organisations and Group Marriage in Australia • Northcote W. Thomas
... from two Tahitian castaways who had seen Captain Cook, and had with them an iron hatchet obtained from the Resolution. They represented the strange beings who traversed the ocean in vast canoes, not lashed with sinnet nor furnished with outriggers, as impious people who laughed at the tabu, and even ate of the consecrated food from the Maraes. They were like the gods; if they were attacked they blew at their assailants with long blow-pipes (pupuhi) from which flames and stones were belched. ...
— Voyage of H.M.S. Pandora - Despatched to Arrest the Mutineers of the 'Bounty' in the - South Seas, 1790-1791 • Edward Edwards
... the most apparent symptom of the disease is the vomiting by the patient of the yellow bile, and hence the doctor selects for the decoction four different herbs, each of which is also called dal[^a]n[)i], because of the color of the root, stalk, or flower. The same idea is carried out in the tabu which generally accompanies the treatment. Thus a scrofulous patient must abstain from eating the meat of a turkey, because the fleshy dewlap which depends from its throat somewhat resembles an inflamed ...
— The Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees • James Mooney
... "pig" and its acquired meaning "cowry". This fact seems to have played some part in fixing upon the pig the notoriety of being "an unclean animal".[425] But it was mainly for other reasons of a very different kind that the eating of swine-flesh was forbidden. The tabu seems to have arisen originally because the pig was a sacred animal identified with the Great Mother and the Water God, and especially associated with both these deities in ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith


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