Skip to content
Vinony

mafia

noun

  1. type of organized crime enterprise
L323512 on Wikidata ↗

Wiktionary

Pronunciation: /ˈmɑfi.ə/ / /ˈmæfi.ə/

name

Etymology: Borrowed from Italian mafia, of uncertain origin. In the first instance, it is not clear whether the lemma in question is a Sicilian exonym or endonym, since written and oral sources on this term are scarce, the etymology remains uncertain and it's worthy of further investigation. It is possibly a regional term of the then recently established Kingdom of Italy; thus the meaning "spirit of hostility to the law" could be just derivative. The hypotheses put forward have been varied, but not very convincing from a reconstructive point of view. See Sicilian mafia for more. See, also, the Wikipedia article for more discussion of the origin of the word. Doublet of mafiya.

  1. A social deduction party game modelling a conflict between an informed minority (the mafia) and an uninformed majority (the innocents). Each player is secretly assigned a role within one of these teams, and the innocents attempt to identify the mafia members before they are all "murdered".

noun

Etymology: See Mafia. The sense "entity which attempts to control a specified arena" makes an analogy to crime-syndicate mafias' attempts to control certain kinds of business in the regions in which they exist.

  1. A hierarchically structured secret organisation engaged in illegal activities like distribution of narcotics, gambling and extortion.
  2. A crime syndicate.
  3. A trusted group of associates, as of a political leader.
  4. An entity which attempts to control a specified arena by violence or threats.

    “moral mafia”

    “Worse, it confirms what one always suspected about the 1930s literary mafia, with their graceless posing and relentless self-obsession — what terrible , terrible bores they were.”