jungle

Etymology

1776, borrowed from Hindustani جنگل (jngl) / जंगल (jaṅgal), from Sanskrit जङ्गल (jaṅgala, “arid, sterile, desert”).

noun

1. A large, undeveloped, humid forest, especially in a tropical region, that is home to many wild plants and animals; a tropical rainforest.
2. (South Asia) Any uncultivated tract of forest or scrub habitat.
3. (colloquial) A place where people behave ruthlessly, unconstrained by law or morality.
   It’s a jungle out there.
   The first-timer just doesn't know what's going on when he gets to jail. […] It's a jungle, you've got to look after yourself first. 1984, Barry Ellem, Doing Time, page 25
   But of course, that excludes the narcissistic delusionals, the deliberate frauds, and the pathological cases of multiple personality. They are all out there in New Age Land, and it's a jungle! 2005, Laura Knight-Jadczyk, The High Strangeness of Dimensions, Densities, and the Process of Alien Abduction
4. (figurative) A tangled mess.
5. (slang) An area where hobos camp together.
6. (UK) A migrant camp.
7. (music, uncountable) A style of electronic dance music and precursor of drum and bass.
   Always more multiracial than other post-Rave scenes, Hardcore got “blacker” as hiphop, Ragga, dub and Soul influences kicked in, and by 93 it had evolved into Jungle. By this point, Hardcore/Jungle (the terms remain interchangeable) was universally scorned by dance hipsters and banished from the media. 1994 September, Simon Reynolds, “Above The Treeline”, in The Wire
8. (Israel, Texas, US) A desert region.
9. (golf, slang) Dense rough.
   Hitting from the Jungle. The rough at some courses is just weeds and sparse grass, as often as not giving a player a decent lie to shoot from. But grass above four inches is nasty. It will grab your club and alter your shots. 2006, Rob Blumer, Rex Chaney, Essential golf instruction, page 167
10. (vulgar, slang) A hairy vulva.

adj

1. (Of musical beat, rhythm, etc.) resembling the fast-paced drumming of traditional peoples of the jungle.
   She gave her first performance at the Philharmonic Auditorium in Los Angeles, offering festival dances, Moro tribal rituals, primitive jungle rhythms and rice harvest ceremonials. 8 Jan 1939, The Tribune, Manila, page 13, column 2
   Somewhere further up the valley a bunch of hippies were getting back to nature by loading up on mind altering chemicals and overwhelming their senses with five million decibels of digital bass and jungle beats. 2005, Sean Dooley, The Big Twitch, Sydney: Allen and Unwin, page 9