Glossary
Every word we use,
defined once.
If a word on this site sent you here, it should be on this page. If it is not, that is our mistake — tell us.
How to read this list
Three kinds of word are mixed together here, and it matters which is which.
- course word — in our language database and taught in the course. Spelled the way our course and our teachers spell it.
- pending speaker check — recorded in a book by an outsider, sometimes decades ago, and not yet confirmed by a fluent speaker. Treat the spelling as provisional.
- not Shipibo — Spanish, Quechua, or regional Amazonian Spanish. Several of the most famous words in this world are not Shipibo at all, and saying so is half the point of this page.
Pronunciations are rough English approximations, not IPA. None of them are recorded yet. When the audio exists it will sit beside each word, in the voice of a named speaker.
These were wrong until July 2026, and we have corrected them. Shipibo is written with the Spanish alphabet, but the letter e stands for a central vowel [ɨ] — the sound in the second syllable of roses — and o stands for [ʊ], the vowel in book. We had been writing “keh-NEH” for kené; it is nearer kuh-NUH. Every pronunciation on this page has been redone on that basis, following an acoustic study of eight Shipibo speakers.
The people and the language
| Word | Means | What to know | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Shipibo-Konibo shee-PEE-boo KOO-nee-boo | The people, and their language | The standard combined form. Konibo named closely related communities upriver of Pucallpa; Xetebo a third group absorbed into the same population. Peru sometimes writes Shipibo-Konibo-Xetebo. | not Shipibo |
| jonibo hoo-NEE-boo | People — what they call themselves | Joni is a person; -bo makes it plural. This, not “Shipibo”, is the word for themselves. | pending speaker check |
| nawabo nah-WAH-boo | Outsiders, strangers, not-people | Everyone who is not Shipibo. You, and us. | pending speaker check |
| shípi SHEE-pee | The pygmy marmoset | The small monkey kept as a pet. “Shipibo” is built on it — a nickname from neighbouring peoples that stuck. | pending speaker check |
| Chama CHA-mah | A slur | Used by the regional mestizo population. Appears in old anthropology. Do not use it. | not Shipibo |
Healers and healing
These four are used almost interchangeably in retreat marketing. They are not interchangeable, and knowing the difference is the clearest sign of whether someone has been informed or sold to.
| Word | Means | What to know | |
|---|---|---|---|
| onanya oo-NAHN-yah | One who knows — a healer who works with plants and song | The word you will most often hear at a retreat. Built on onan-, to know. | pending speaker check |
| onanyabo oo-nahn-YAH-boo | Onanya, plural | Used in the 2021 study to describe the five practitioners working at one centre. | pending speaker check |
| meraya muh-RAH-yah | One who sees | Recorded by two outsiders twenty years apart as the highest standing there is — above the onanya — and described as one who sees ahead rather than one who cures. Both note he also fishes, hunts and tends his garden. It was never a full-time profession. Hern transcribes it muraia; we use meraya. | pending speaker check |
| shaman — | English catch-all | We avoid it. It flattens at least three distinct roles into one borrowed Siberian word. | not Shipibo |
| curandero / maestro — | Spanish | Widely used across the Peruvian Amazon, including by Shipibo people speaking Spanish. Not Shipibo words. | not Shipibo |
| One correction that belongs here: in the older record almost everyone was a healer to some degree — herbal knowledge was ordinary and widespread. The meraya is the exception, not the rule. The retreat economy needs a specialist, so it erased the general competence. | |||
Plants and medicine
| Word | Means | What to know | |
|---|---|---|---|
| ráo RAH-oo | Plant, medicine, and the power in it — at once | One word covering all three. That is not vagueness; it is the idea. The plants → | course word |
| óni OO-nee | The vine preparation — what the world calls ayahuasca | One older source glosses the common name as “dead man’s vine”. The vine is cut, pounded and boiled for hours. | course word |
| ayahuasca ah-yah-WAH-skah | The brew | A Quechua word, not Shipibo. It is the term the world uses, so we use it too — but it came from the Andes, not from this river. | not Shipibo |
| nishi NEE-shee | Vine | Appears in the older literature for ayahuasca. Not in our database yet. | pending speaker check |
| mapacho mah-PAH-choh | Strong jungle tobacco, Nicotiana rustica | Spanish. Described by practitioners as the working plant of a ceremony — smoke carries the song, clears heaviness, holds protection. | not Shipibo |
| samá sah-MAH | The dieta | Restriction, isolation and discipline over a long period. In our course materials it is glossed three ways at once: dieta, energetic mastery, connection with plant spirits. The dieta → | course word |
| lupuna / shóno loo-POO-nah | A very large tree | Held to be dangerous to cut. In one reading it holds the layered worlds apart. Shóno is the 1964 transcription. | pending speaker check |
Song
| Word | Means | What to know | |
|---|---|---|---|
| ícaro EE-kah-roh | A healing song | Not a Shipibo word. It is regional Amazonian Spanish, from Quechua ikaray, to blow smoke while singing, and it covers the songs of many peoples across the Peruvian Amazon — not only Shipibo. It is the word you will hear at every retreat and in almost everything written in English. | not Shipibo |
| bewá buh-WAH | Song | The Shipibo word. In our database. If you want to name the thing in the language it belongs to, this is the word — though what any given singer calls their own songs is theirs to say. | course word |
| huihua wee-WAH | Song | A 2004 transcription of what is likely the same word. Unconfirmed. | pending speaker check |
| We publish no recordings of ícaros or bewá, and we do not ask for them. If a singer ever offers one freely, with their name on it, we will say so on the page. | |||
Art and things
| Word | Means | What to know | |
|---|---|---|---|
| kené kuh-NUH | The geometric design | On cloth, pottery, paddles, and historically on faces. Made mostly by women. Kené → | course word |
| kewé kuh-WUH | Design worked into cloth | Our own gloss needs a fluent speaker to settle. Whether it names embroidery, a finished piece, or an action, we do not yet state with confidence. | pending speaker check |
| nanë nah-NUH | Genipa — the blue-black dye | Called huito in regional Spanish. Used for face designs, including on newborns. | pending speaker check |
| chomo CHOO-moo | The big storage jar | Cane juice ferments in them for about two weeks. | pending speaker check |
| quënquësh kun-KUSH | A potsherd | Shipibo are among very few peoples with a dedicated word for it — old sherds were ground up and mixed into new clay. | pending speaker check |
| chitonte / racote — | Skirt / painted cotton shawl | Recorded in 1982; the racote also carried babies. | pending speaker check |
The world, and the river
| Word | Means | What to know | |
|---|---|---|---|
| nete NUH-tuh | World, day, time-space at once | Our course materials teach four principal worlds using this word. Cosmology → | course word |
| kayá kah-YAH | The soul — a shadow-like second self | Recorded 1964: it leaves the body at death, and travels in sleep. | course word |
| yoshin YOO-sheen | Spirit of the dead | Many kinds, mostly active at night. A newborn’s face was painted to turn them away. | pending speaker check |
| janecon hah-nuh-KOON | The true name | The Shipibo name, given a month or more after birth. 2004 transcription. | pending speaker check |
| cocha KOH-chah | Oxbow lake | Spanish/Quechua, used everywhere in the region. Many communities sit on one. | not Shipibo |
| mijano mee-HAH-noh | The dry-season upstream fish migration | Spanish. July and August. Historically the abundance the year was built on. River life → | not Shipibo |
| chacra CHAH-krah | Garden plot | Spanish/Quechua. Where manioc and plantain grow. | not Shipibo |
| maloca mah-LOH-kah | Large communal or ceremonial house | Spanish, used across Amazonia. Most retreat ceremony spaces are called this. | not Shipibo |
Why so many say “pending”
Because most of these words reach us through books written by outsiders — an American in 1982, a Finn in 1964, a physician in 2004 — each transcribing what they heard, decades apart, before there was a standard way to write the language. Two of them wrote the same word for healer two different ways.
We could quietly modernise all of it and look authoritative. Instead the spellings we are confident in are marked, the ones we are not are marked differently, and the difference between them is a Shipibo speaker saying the word out loud. That work started in 2026.