Hindu

How to spell hindu

5 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce hindu

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does hindu mean?

1. nounA person who follows Hinduism, the major religion and cultural tradition of the Indian subcontinent.
2. adjectiveRelating to Hinduism or its followers, customs and culture.

Hindu in a sentence

• noun

  As a devout hindu, she visited the temple every morning before work.

• adjective

  The museum displayed several hindu statues carved from sandstone.

• noun

  The festival of Diwali is celebrated by every hindu in the community.

• adjective

  The couple held a traditional hindu wedding ceremony in the garden.

Where does hindu come from?

Language of origin: Sanskrit

The word goes back to the Sanskrit Sindhu, which literally meant 'a large body of water' and was the name given to the great river now called the Indus. When ancient Persians borrowed the name, they pronounced the initial 's' as 'h', turning Sindhu into Hindū, and used it for the land and the people living beyond that river. Through Persian and later Arabic usage, the term came to describe the inhabitants of the Indian subcontinent and, in time, specifically those who followed the indigenous religious traditions rather than Islam. European travellers and traders picked up the word, and it entered English in the seventeenth century, at first spelled in several ways before settling on 'Hindu'. The same river-name root also gave us 'India' and 'Indus', so the silent logic of the spelling is that the 'h' is an old Persian softening of an original 's'.

How the word is built

• Hindu (a single unanalysable root from a Persian place-name; no native English prefix or suffix)