Khmer

How to spell khmer

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce khmer

What does khmer mean?

1. nounThe principal ethnic group of Cambodia, or the Austroasiatic language they speak.
2. adjectiveRelating to the people, language, or culture of Cambodia.

Khmer in a sentence

• noun

  The restaurant menu was printed in both English and khmer.

• adjective

  The museum displayed ancient khmer carvings from the temples at Angkor.

• noun

  She spent a year in Phnom Penh learning to read and write khmer.

• adjective

  He studied khmer architecture for his thesis on temple design.

Where does khmer come from?

Language of origin: Other

Khmer is the English form of the name the people of Cambodia have long used for themselves, recorded in Khmer as khmae. It belongs to the Austroasiatic family of languages spoken across mainland Southeast Asia, and the word names both the dominant ethnic group of Cambodia and their language, which is written in its own distinctive script descended ultimately from the scripts of southern India. The term reached English in the nineteenth century through French, since France controlled Cambodia as part of French Indochina and French scholars and administrators popularised the spelling Khmer. The spelling trap lives entirely in that French-mediated form: the kh together stands for a plain k sound with no separate h, and the ending mer is pronounced like the English word for the season after spring rather than as it looks. Many English speakers know the word chiefly from the phrase Khmer Rouge, the communist movement of the 1970s, which keeps the spelling fixed in modern memory.

How the word is built

• Single unanalysable root: Khmer is an ethnonym borrowed whole, with no English prefix or suffix to break it into (the kh- spelling represents a single sound, not a prefix).