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say it: MAH-fee-uh
mafia is a noun meaning "a crime syndicate in the United States; organized in families; believed to have important relations to the Sicilian Mafia". It is pronounced /ˈmɑfiə/ — MAH-fee-uh. It carries 3 recorded senses.
a crime syndicate in the United States; organized in families; believed to have important relations to the Sicilian Mafia
a secret terrorist group in Sicily; originally opposed tyranny but evolved into a criminal organization in the middle of the 19th century
terrorism
Forms marked · are formed by the regular rule rather than recorded in the source data. English keeps a few hundred irregulars and the rest follow the pattern, so the rule is right far more often than not — but it is a rule, and the mark says so.
Definitions, synonyms and semantic relations for mafia come from Princeton University’s WordNet. The pronunciation comes from the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary. Commonness is measured against a corpus of everyday English. Full sources and licences.