Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • A city and administrative region of southeast China comprising the Macau Peninsula and two offshore islands in the South China Sea west of Hong Kong. A Portuguese trading post was established here in 1557 and became a free port in 1849. Macau was a Portuguese overseas province until 1999, when it reverted to Chinese sovereignty. It has a large tourism industry and many casinos.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • proper noun Same as Macao, the territory.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • proper noun A city just west of Hong Kong, a highly autonomous special region of China, previously under Portuguese control.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • noun a former Portuguese province on the south coast of China and two islands in the South China Sea; reverted to China in 1999

Etymologies

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From Portuguese Macau, corruption of Southern Sinitic ama (name of a patron goddess of sailors) + ngao "bay, port."

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