See mongo in All languages combined, or Wiktionary
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"text": "The old room was furnished in \"mongo,\" Sanit lingo for stuff picked out of the garbage. Mongo-picking, Ukeles explained, \"is against the law. The garbage belongs to the City. But until a recent rehabilitation program, which is the first since the Depression, the Sanmen never had their own furnishings.\" Prior to the show, the Sanmen voted on the worst facilities in the system and Ukeles selected the exhibition mongo from them—shabby, broken-down furniture, walls cluttered with cheap […]"
},
{
"ref": "2006, Fine Books & Collections, volume 4, page 56, reviewing MONGO: Adventures in Trash by Ted Botha (2004)",
"text": "[Mongo] refers to trash, or more specifically, to treasure found in trash: books, artifacts, furniture, even food. Ted Botha's book explores a whole culture, and various subcultures, that revolve around mongo. Those obsessed with mongo often live on the margins, […]"
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"ref": "2013, Robin Nagle, Picking Up: On the Streets and Behind the Trucks, →ISBN:",
"text": "Loading out on house-to-house can take many hours, but such routes have other perks, especially for someone who likes to mongo. As a noun, “mongo” is Sanitation slang for treasure salvaged from the trash, with an understanding that the definition of “treasure” is both broad and personal. As a verb, “to mongo” is to look for and rescue such wealth. Sal Federici didn't mongo, but he tolerated his partner's predilection for it. Ray Kurtz was not the district's acknowledged mongo king, […]",
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"text": "push mongo",
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"A manner of pushing oneself on a skateboard with one's front foot as opposed to one's back foot."
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"(skateboarding) A manner of pushing oneself on a skateboard with one's front foot as opposed to one's back foot."
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"word": "mongo"
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"forms": [
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"form": "mongos",
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"pos": "noun",
"senses": [
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"word": "mongoloid"
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"Clipping of mongoloid."
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"expansion": "Borrowed from Spanish mongo",
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"word": "black mongo"
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"word": "green mongo"
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{
"word": "mongo bean"
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"word": "red mongo"
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"(Philippines) mung bean"
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"ipa": "/ˈmoŋ.ɡo/",
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"word": "mongo"
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"ref": "1984, [NYC] Issue 1-6, page 51",
"text": "The old room was furnished in \"mongo,\" Sanit lingo for stuff picked out of the garbage. Mongo-picking, Ukeles explained, \"is against the law. The garbage belongs to the City. But until a recent rehabilitation program, which is the first since the Depression, the Sanmen never had their own furnishings.\" Prior to the show, the Sanmen voted on the worst facilities in the system and Ukeles selected the exhibition mongo from them—shabby, broken-down furniture, walls cluttered with cheap […]"
},
{
"ref": "2006, Fine Books & Collections, volume 4, page 56, reviewing MONGO: Adventures in Trash by Ted Botha (2004)",
"text": "[Mongo] refers to trash, or more specifically, to treasure found in trash: books, artifacts, furniture, even food. Ted Botha's book explores a whole culture, and various subcultures, that revolve around mongo. Those obsessed with mongo often live on the margins, […]"
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],
"ref": "2013, Robin Nagle, Picking Up: On the Streets and Behind the Trucks, →ISBN:",
"text": "Loading out on house-to-house can take many hours, but such routes have other perks, especially for someone who likes to mongo. As a noun, “mongo” is Sanitation slang for treasure salvaged from the trash, with an understanding that the definition of “treasure” is both broad and personal. As a verb, “to mongo” is to look for and rescue such wealth. Sal Federici didn't mongo, but he tolerated his partner's predilection for it. Ray Kurtz was not the district's acknowledged mongo king, […]",
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"Still-usable things salvaged (by sanmen) from garbage."
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"(New York City) Still-usable things salvaged (by sanmen) from garbage."
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"A manner of pushing oneself on a skateboard with one's front foot as opposed to one's back foot."
],
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[
"skateboarding",
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"push",
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"front",
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"(skateboarding) A manner of pushing oneself on a skateboard with one's front foot as opposed to one's back foot."
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"word": "mongo"
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"Clipping of mongoloid."
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"word": "mongo"
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],
"derived": [
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"word": "black mongo"
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{
"word": "green mongo"
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{
"word": "mongo bean"
},
{
"word": "red mongo"
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"forms": [
{
"form": "mungo",
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"mung bean"
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"(Philippines) mung bean"
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Download raw JSONL data for mongo meaning in English (5.6kB)
This page is a part of the kaikki.org machine-readable English dictionary. This dictionary is based on structured data extracted on 2026-01-03 from the enwiktionary dump dated 2026-01-01 using wiktextract (96027d6 and 9905b1f). The data shown on this site has been post-processed and various details (e.g., extra categories) removed, some information disambiguated, and additional data merged from other sources. See the raw data download page for the unprocessed wiktextract data.
If you use this data in academic research, please cite Tatu Ylonen: Wiktextract: Wiktionary as Machine-Readable Structured Data, Proceedings of the 13th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC), pp. 1317-1325, Marseille, 20-25 June 2022. Linking to the relevant page(s) under https://kaikki.org would also be greatly appreciated.