Glossary of Argentine Tango

Argentine tango is a partnered social dance and the musical genre written for it: a couple moves as one in a close embrace, improvising a shared walk to music led by the breathy, plaintive voice of the bandoneón. Music and dance arose together in the urban periphery of the Río de la Plata — centered on Buenos Aires, with Montevideo a second early focus — toward the end of the nineteenth century ^[1]. It took shape from the European and African musical currents that met in those port cities. This glossary gathers the terms a dancer or listener encounters in tango's music, lyric, and movement — the instruments that give the genre its sound, the slang that fills its songs, the figures who shaped it, and the words for how it is danced. Entries are grouped by theme so that related terms read together rather than in alphabetical isolation.

The music and its instruments

Bandoneón. The bandoneón — a bellows-driven, button-keyed relative of the accordion — is the instrument most closely identified with tango. Its sighing attack and sustained chords carry both the genre's rhythmic drive and its melancholy melodic line.

Orquesta típica. The standard tango ensemble is built around the bandoneón and completed by violin, piano, and double bass. Together these instruments lay down tango's marked, walking pulse — usually notated in 2/4 or 4/4 — beneath an ornamented melody to which the couple dances.

Organito. A hand-cranked street organ that carried tango tunes through the neighbourhoods. Named in tango-era porteño poetry, the organito stands for the everyday channels by which the music travelled out of the salons and into the streets.

The lyric and its language

Lunfardo. The argot of Buenos Aires, Lunfardo supplied the characteristic vocabulary of early tango lyric and gives many songs their streetwise voice; its slang runs through the verse of poets such as Celedonio Flores.

Letrista. The lyricist who composes a tango's sung text. The role is exemplified by Celedonio Flores, among the most popular of the letristas, who drew openly on Lunfardo for his words.

Payador. An improvising guitar-poet of the porteño streets. The payador's extemporized, sung verse belonged to the wider street culture out of which early tango lyricism grew.

The dance and the embrace

Close embrace. Tango is danced chest-to-chest in a close embrace, the lead and the follow moving through a continuous, improvised sequence of steps shaped to the music's tempo and dynamics — an exchange often described as a wordless conversation between the partners.

Sub-styles. Over time the dance branched into several sub-styles, each with its own posture, embrace, and vocabulary of figures, reflecting tango's capacity to adapt to changing social and theatrical settings.

Tango Argentino. The 1983 musical stage production that presented the history of Argentine tango, together with its many varieties, to theatrical audiences ^[2].

The dancers

The social dancer. Empirical studies of tango dancers have examined how the presence of music and of a dance partner shapes dancers' emotional and even hormonal responses, treating the dance as a measurable social and affective experience.

Who dances. Surveys describe contemporary tango dancers as a highly educated population that often takes up the dance in adulthood, drawn by hedonistic and social motives and treating tango as a primary leisure pursuit.