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A Mexican dish of cornmeal dough shell filled with various ingredients (e.g. chopped beef, pork, sweet filling) then steamed in corn husks.
Usage notes
The standard Spanish singular is tamal, and thus some proscribe tamale as an incorrect back-formation, preferring to use tamal as the English singular. The similarity of tamale to the ancestral Nahuatl tamalli is not generally cited in support of the English usage of tamale as its spelling does not match with the Nahuatl spelling and the word originally entered via Spanish in the form of tamales.
