Mafia (; ) derives from the
Sicilian adjective '
, which roughly translated means "swagger" but can also be translated as "boldness" or "bravado". According to scholar Diego Gambetta, ' (
mafioso in Italian) in 19th-century
Sicily, in reference to a man, signified "fearless", "enterprising", and "proud". In reference to a woman, the feminine-form adjective ''
means "beautiful" or "attractive". Because Sicily was under Islamic rule from 827 to 1091, Mafia'' may have come to Sicilian through
Arabic, although the word's origins are uncertain.
Mafia in the
Florentine dialect means "poverty" or "misery", while a cognate word in
Piedmontese is
mafium, meaning "a little or petty person". Possible Arabic roots of the word include: • (), meaning "exempted". In Islamic law,
jizya is the yearly tax imposed on non-Muslims residing in Muslim lands, and people who pay it are "exempted" from prosecution. •
màha, meaning "quarry" or "cave"; the
mafie were the caves in the region of
Marsala that acted as hiding places for persecuted Muslims and later served other types of refugees, in particular
Giuseppe Garibaldi's "
Redshirts" after their embarkment on Sicily in 1860 in the struggle for
Italian unification. According to ,
cave in Arabic literary writing is
Maqtaa hagiar, while in popular Arabic it is pronounced as
Mahias hagiar, and then "from
Maqtaa (Mahias) = Mafia, that is cave, hence the name
(ma)qotai,
quarrymen, stone-cutters, that is, Mafia". • (), meaning "aggressive boasting" or "bragging". • (), meaning "rejected", considered to be the most plausible derivation; developed into
marpiuni ("swindler") to
marpiusu and finally
mafiusu. • (), meaning "safety" or "protection". • (), the name of an Arab tribe that ruled
Palermo. The local peasants imitated these Arabs and as a result the tribe's name entered the popular lexicon. The word
Mafia was then used to refer to the defenders of Palermo during the
Sicilian Vespers against rule of the
Capetian House of Anjou on 30 March 1282. • (), meaning "place of shade".
Shade meaning refuge or derived from refuge. After the Normans destroyed the Saracen rule in Sicily in the 11th century, Sicily became feudalistic. Most Arab smallholders became serfs on new estates, with some escaping to "the Mafia". It became a secret refuge. The public's association of the word with the criminal secret society was perhaps inspired by the 1863 play '''' ('The Mafiosi of the Vicaria') by Giuseppe Rizzotto and Gaspare Mosca.
Mafia and ''
are never mentioned in the play. The play is about a Palermo prison gang with traits similar to the Mafia: a boss, an initiation ritual, and talk of umirtà
(omertà or code of silence) and pizzu (a codeword for extortion money). The play had great success throughout Italy. Soon after, the use of Mafia'' began appearing in the Italian state's early reports on the phenomenon. The word made its first official appearance in 1865 in a report by the then
prefect of Palermo . == Definitions ==