jumbo adj.

1738, originally in an account of an incident which took place 1732 near Sami in modern Gambia. The Mumbo Jumbo was described as a costume "idol" used by locals to frighten women into submission. The outfit was placed on a stick outside the town during the day, and by night someone would dress in it and visit women or other people deemed a problem, to settle disputes or bestow punishment. Other 18c. spellings include Munbo Jumbo, Numbo Jumbo and Mumbo Chumbo. The original account is of the Mandingo people, but no obvious Mandingo term has been identified as the source. Proposals have included mama dyambo "pompom-wearing ancestor" and mamagyombo "magician who exorcises troubled ancestor spirits." Perhaps it is a loan word from another Niger-Congo language (see zombie.) The French transcription of the word is moumbo-dioumbo or moumbo-ioumbo, Portuguese mumban-jumban.

Every town in the region was said to have a Mumbo Jumbo, and 19c. colonial accounts of the practice made it into a byword for a "superstitious object of senseless worship" by 1866, hence the meaning "big, empty talk," attested from 1896.

a word of vague etymology, perhaps a convergence of two or more words, given wide application in late 19c. and settling into its main modern meaning "floozie" from early 1920s, with a revival in 1980s.

Bimbo first appears as the name of an alcoholic punch, mentioned in newspapers from New York state (1837), Boston (1842), and New Orleans (1844, but as having come from Boston). It may be connected to the earlier bumbo (1748) a synonym for punch (n.2). This sense quickly fades, though it occasionally is on menus as late as 1895.

From 1860-1910, Bimbo as a proper name is frequent: It is the name or part of the name of several race horses, dogs, and monkeys, a circus elephant (perhaps echoing jumbo), and a jester character in a play. It is in the title of a three-act musical farce ("Bimbo of Bombay"), and the name of a popular "knockabout clown"/actor in England and several other stage clowns. Also it appears as a genuine surname, and "The Bimbos" were a popular brother-sister comedy acrobatics team in vaudeville.

A separate bimbo seems to have entered American English c. 1900, via immigration, as an Italian word for a little child or a child's doll, evidently a contraction of bambino "baby."

By 1920 it began to be used generally of a stupid or ineffectual man, a usage Damon Runyon in 1919 traced to Philadelphia prize-fight slang. He wrote, that July, in a column printed in several newspapers, of a hotel lobby fist-fight between "Yankee Schwartz, the old Philadelphia boxer," and another man, which Schwartz wins.

"No Bimbo can lick me," he said, breathlessly, at the finish.

"What's a Bimbo?" somebody asked "Tiny" Maxwell, on the assumption that "Tiny" ought to be familiar with the Philadelphia lingo.

A bimbo," said "Tiny," "is t-t-two degrees lower than a coo-coo—cootie."

The word does turn up in Philadelphia papers' accounts of prizefights (e.g. "Fitzsimmons Is No Bimbo," Evening Public Ledger, May 25, 1920).

By 1920 the sense of "floozie" had developed (said to have been popularized by "Variety" staffer Jack Conway), perhaps boosted by "My Little Bimbo Down on Bamboo Isle," a popular 1920 song in which the singer (imploring the audience not to alert his wife) tells of "his shipwreck on a Fiji Isle and the little Bimbo he left down on that Bamboo isle." Its resurrection in this sense during 1980s U.S. political sex scandals led to derivatives including diminutive bimbette (1990) and male form himbo (1988).

"stupid person," by 1951, American English, from dumb (adj.). The Disney musical cartoon is from 1941; in it the elephant's name is a mocking nickname based on Jumbo.