beguine

plural beguines

1. A ballroom dance, similar to a slow rumba, originally from French West Indies and popularized abroad largely through the song "Begin the Beguine"; the music for the dance.

   When they begin the beguine, / It brings back the sound of music so tender / It brings back the night of tropical splendor, / It brings back a memory ever green.

   1935, Cole Porter, Begin the Beguine

   2 more examples

   1956, Langston Hughes, I Wonder as I Wander, 2003, Arnold Rampersad, Dolan Hubbard (editors), The Collected Works of Langston Hughes, Volume 14: Autobiography, page 69, It was a haunting kind of beguine with a strange sad lyric about slavery and freedom set against insistent drums and voluptuous maracas:

   He is especially fascinated by the chacha, the percussion instrument that sets the basic rolling rhythmic foundation of the beguine and propels the dancers, writing that “the tempo is set by a shiny tin container filled with pebbles.[…]″

   2003, Brent Hayes Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora, page 174

plural Beguines

1. historicalA member of a semimonastic Christian lay religious order active in Northern Europe, particularly in the Low Countries in the 13th–16th centuries.