Ukrainian

How to spell ukrainian

9 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce ukrainian

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does ukrainian mean?

1. adjectiveRelating to Ukraine, its people, language, or culture.
2. nounA person from Ukraine, or the Slavic language spoken there.

Ukrainian in a sentence

• adjective

  The restaurant serves traditional ukrainian dumplings and beetroot soup.

• noun

  As a fluent ukrainian, he was asked to translate the contract.

• adjective

  She signed up for evening ukrainian language classes at the local college.

• noun

  Many a ukrainian settled in this prairie town more than a century ago.

Where does ukrainian come from?

Language of origin: Other

This word is built on the place name Ukraine, which comes from the Slavic word okraina, meaning 'borderland' or 'frontier region', formed from the elements u 'at, by' and kraj 'edge, border'. The land was so called because it lay at the margins of larger medieval states, and the sense of a borderland gradually hardened into the proper name of the nation. English added the productive suffix -ian, drawn ultimately from Latin -ianus, which it routinely attaches to country names to describe people, languages, and things that belong to a place. The result entered English in the nineteenth century as both an adjective and a noun, broadly in step with growing Western awareness of the region and its people. The spelling trap lives in the middle: the country is spelled Ukraine with an 'ai', and that 'ai' must survive into Ukrainian, where it is then followed by a second 'i' before the ending, giving the easily muddled sequence 'a-i-n-i-an'.

How the word is built

• Ukrain- (from Ukraine, the country name)
• -ian (suffix forming an adjective or noun of belonging)