Mambo is a lively Cuban dance, and also the music you dance it to — horns, piano, a strong beat you can count. It grew famous in the mid-twentieth century and then travelled; older people may remember it as a ballroom or club dance, while younger people more often meet the word in old songs, in film, or as a flavour inside later Latin dance. You can use it as a noun (“They played a mambo”) and, a little more loosely, as a verb (“They mamboed across the floor”). It is not slang, but it is not a school-science word either: it belongs to music and dance talk. Though actually the English dance sense is the one learners will meet; the older Haitian meaning (a priestess) is how the word began, not what most English speakers mean now.