
n., pl., -jos, or -joes.
- A magic charm or spell.
- An amulet, often a small flannel bag containing one or more magic items, worn by adherents of hoodoo or voodoo.
- Personal magnetism; charm.
[Perhaps ultimately from Fula moco'o, medicine man.]
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[Perhaps ultimately from Fula moco'o, medicine man.]
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If your mojo is working, you lead a charmed life. That's because mojo, in its original sense, is a charm, kept in a cloth bag. Depending on which conjure doctor you go to, the charm can be roots, rats, snakes, lizards, pumpkin seeds, dirt, clay, or steel wool. Those were ingredients mentioned in North Carolina in 1962. Back in the late 1930s, in Memphis, Tennessee, to make a mojo one expert said you would sew a red flannel bag with these ingredients: High John de Conker (a plant known also as Solomon's seal), black lodestone, Adam and Eve root, and violet incense powders. A 1946 account from New Orleans said that the mojo was "the leg bone of a black cat that's been killed in a graveyard at midnight."
If your mojo is working, you have sex appeal. But if someone else touches or even sees your mojo, it can lose its power. That's the explanation of the lyrics in the 1928 blues song: "My rider's got a mojo and she won't let me see.... She's got to fool her daddy, she's got to keep that mojo hid; but papa's got something for to find that mojo with." Written evidence for the word goes back to 1926 in the song title, "My Daddy's Got the Mojo, But I Got The Say-So." Nowadays the word is widely used, often with no reference to a magical cloth bag but simply meaning power, influence, or advantage.
The word is African American. Its origin is uncertain, but it seems probable that mojo ultimately came from Africa. If it did, a good candidate for the source is moco'o, meaning a conjure doctor or person who works magic. That word is from the Fula or Fulfulde language, a member of the Fulani branch of the Niger-Congo language family. Fula is spoken as a native language by two-thirds of a million people in Cameroon, and by four million more in Cameroon as a second language. One other English word that may possibly come from Fula (if not from Mandingo) is yam (1657).
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Mojo refers to a magical charm bag used in voodoo, which has transmuted into a slang word for self-confidence, self-esteem or sex appeal. It may also refer to:
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![]() | American Heritage Dictionary. The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition Copyright © 2007, 2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Updated in 2009. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved. Read more |
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![]() | Houghton Mifflin's International Word Origins. The World in So Many Words, by Allan A. Metcalf. Copyright © 1999 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved. Read more |
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![]() | McGraw-Hill Slang Dictionary. McGraw-Hill's Essential American Slang Dictionary. Copyright © 2007 by McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved. Read more |
| Oxford Dictionary of Modern Slang. Oxford University Press. © 1997, 2008, 2010 All rights reserved. Read more | ||
| Rhymes. Oxford University Press. © 2006, 2007 All rights reserved. Read more | ||
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![]() | Wikipedia on Answers.com. This article is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article Mojo. Read more |
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