Where does the word "tango" come from?

Nobody knows for certain where the word tango comes from, and the argument has run for more than a century. What the records show is that the word is older than the dance. Before tango named a style of music, it named a place.

In the 18th and 19th centuries, around the Río de la Plata, tango and tambo were used almost interchangeably. Both meant the sites and gatherings where Black people, many of them enslaved, met to dance and make music. In 1789 a Buenos Aires official, Manuel Warnes, complained about slave dances described with the word. In 1807 a Montevideo council resolution banned Black dances.

The dance we call tango took shape later, in the 1880s, in the poor port districts on both sides of the river. It mixed the Argentine milonga, the Spanish-Cuban habanera and the candombe celebrations of Uruguay.

The word's deeper source is where the experts split. Etymonline calls it probably Niger-Congo and compares Ibibio tamgu, "to dance." In 1957 the historian Ricardo Rodríguez Molas studied the languages of enslaved Africans. He found tango used for meeting places in Africa and colonial America, and argued that the word was African. Some writers point to Kikongo ntangu, which can mean "sun" or "hour."

Others look to Europe. One theory starts with Spanish tambor, "drum," worn down to tambo in Buenos Aires. Another starts with Portuguese tanger, "to play an instrument." The Royal Spanish Academy's 1914 dictionary derived it from Latin tangere and later dropped the claim. A "double-entry" theory tries to reconcile the camps. The word named Black dance sites in colonial times, then came back from Cuba and Andalusia to name the music.

The writer José Gobello eventually called the Hispanic-versus-African argument largely unproductive, since the Hispanic influences had African roots too.

The word reached English in 1913, the year the dance became a rage in Britain and America. Paris had caught it first, followed by London and Berlin. In 2009 UNESCO added tango to its intangible cultural heritage lists, on a joint bid from Argentina and Uruguay.