zimbabwehttp://www.oed.com/dictionary/zimbabwe_n%3Ftab%3Dmeaning_and_useZimbabwe, n.
Revised 2022

Zimbabwenoun

  1. 1891–
    Any of the numerous ruined stone-walled settlements scattered across Zimbabwe and neighbouring countries and dating from medieval times.
    1. 1891
      For centuries this circular building formed ‘the Zimbabwe’ or Royal kraal of those Kaffir Emperors, the Monomatapa.., which was once very powerful, but which was afterwards split..into many parts, each governed by separate chiefs with their own Zimbabwe or Royal kraal, so that the name is now oft recurring in Mashonaland.
      Mr. Bent's Explor. in Mashonaland 15 December in Times 14 January (1892) 8/1
    2. 1963
      Other ‘Zimbabwes’—over 200 of them..—lie scattered all over Southern Rhodesia.
      R. Summers in E. Bacon, Vanished Civilisations iii. 36/2
    3. 2004
      British archaeologists and colonizers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries claimed that the monumental medieval stone zimbabwes were ‘Phoenician’.
      M. Given, Archaeol. of Colonized ix. 164

Zimbabwe, n. was revised in June 2022.

Zimbabwe, n. was last modified in September 2024.