Indian

How to spell indian

6 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce indian

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does indian mean?

1. adjectiveRelating to the country of India, its people, languages, or culture.
2. nounA person from India or of Indian descent.

Indian in a sentence

• adjective

  The new indian restaurant on the corner serves an excellent lamb curry.

• noun

  As a proud indian, he flew home to celebrate the festival of lights with his family.

• adjective

  She studied classical indian music for several years before moving abroad.

• noun

  The visiting indian gave a lecture on the economy of his home state.

Where does indian come from?

Language of origin: Sanskrit

This word traces back through Latin and Greek to the great river the ancient world knew as the Indos, the stream we now call the Indus. The river name itself came from the Sanskrit sindhu, meaning simply 'river' or 'the great waterway', which passed into Old Persian as hindu and then into Greek as Indos, with the initial 's' worn away. The Greeks and Romans used India to mean the lands lying beyond that river, and the adjective form, built with the familiar suffix -an meaning 'belonging to', described the people and goods that came from there. English took the word over by the late medieval period, and its meaning later stretched, famously and mistakenly, when European explorers reached the Americas believing they had sailed to the Indies, fixing the word onto the Indigenous peoples they met. The spelling stays steady at -ian, and the small trap is remembering that single 'd' and the 'ia' vowel pair rather than a doubled or reshuffled ending.

How the word is built

• India (place name, from the Indus river)
• -an (adjective/noun suffix meaning 'belonging to')