A type of South American plant or the musical style associated with a particular region, though the exact meaning is uncertain in modern English.
Possibly from Portuguese or Spanish colonial language, borrowed from indigenous languages of South America. The word's origins remain somewhat obscure in contemporary usage, suggesting it may be a regional or archaic term.
Many words from colonial South America have murky etymologies because Europeans documented indigenous languages inconsistently—'aranga' might be the victim of spelling variations and regional dialects that were lost when speakers of the original language stopped using it!
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