Shaman

How to spell shaman

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce shaman

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does shaman mean?

1. nounA person regarded as having access to the spirit world, typically acting as a healer, guide, or intermediary in certain traditional cultures.

Shaman in a sentence

• The documentary followed a village shaman who led healing ceremonies.

• During the expedition the anthropologist interviewed a local shaman about ancestral rituals.

Where does shaman come from?

Language of origin: Other

This word came into English at the very end of the 1600s, ultimately from the Tungusic languages of Siberia, where the Evenki word šaman named a person believed to communicate with the spirit world, often through trance, drumming, and healing rituals. English picked it up indirectly: Russian explorers and traders in Siberia carried the word back as shaman, and German scholarly accounts of the region passed it further west. Some early commentators tried to link it to Sanskrit śramaṇa, a wandering Buddhist ascetic, but most modern scholars regard that connection as a coincidence and treat the Tungusic origin as primary. Because the word was borrowed whole from a non-European language, it has no Latin or Greek parts to fall back on, which is part of why the single-m spelling can feel uncertain. The trap for writers is the temptation to double the m or to add an extra a; remembering it as one tidy borrowed unit, sha-man, helps keep the spelling clean.

How the word is built

• shaman (single root borrowed whole; no native English prefix or suffix)