oriental
adjective · noun
Simple meaning
About the regions east of the Mediterranean, beyond the Roman Empire or the early Christian world.
Pronunciation
Say it like this:
awreeehntuhlSay the bold part a little louder.
IPA pronunciation (US)
ɔɹiˈɛntəl
This word is pronounced essentially the same in American and British English, so one transcription covers both.
IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) is a standard way of writing speech sounds.
Definition
Everyday modern meanings first, grouped by part of speech.
adjective
Pertaining to the regions east of the Mediterranean, beyond the Roman Empire or the early Christian world; of the Near East, the Middle East or the Far East, now especially relating to East Asia.
Of a pearl or other precious stone: having a superior lustre.
Designating various types of aromatic tobacco grown in Turkey and the Balkans.
Alternative letter-case form of Oriental.
noun
A lily cultivar of a widely varied group, with strong scent.
A member or descendant of the peoples and cultures of the Orient.
A precious stone, especially an orient pearl.
Alternative letter-case form of Oriental.
Word Aura™
How this word commonly comes across.
Aura for this meaning
This meaning: Pertaining to the regions east of the Mediterranean, beyond the Roman Empire or the early Christian world; of the Near East, the Middle East or the Far East, now especially relating to East Asia.
Used this way, oriental is a reasonably familiar word that usually carries little praise or criticism of its own. It usually sounds natural in a wide range of settings.
- Emotional tone
- Neutral
- Formality
- Neutral
- Intensity
- Not strongly marked
- How common
- Moderately common
- Connotation
- No strong connotation
- Usage feel
- Neutral and straightforward
Word Aura describes common impressions, not a measurement. Tone changes with sentence, speaker, relationship and situation.
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Common Patterns and Combinations
How this word naturally appears with others.
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Word Family
Related forms, grouped by how they connect.
Compound terms
Established multiword terms.
A plant of eastern Asia.
Large tree of southeastern Europe to Asia Minor.
Commonly cultivated Asiatic perennial poppy having stiff heavily haired leaves and bright scarlet or pink to orange flowers.
Dark brown cockroach originally from orient now nearly cosmopolitan in distribution.
Asian scops owl.
Leishmaniasis of the skin.
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Dictionary data from Wiktionary via the Free Dictionary API. Simple meanings, combinations and word intelligence are built from verified reference data, no AI is used to load this page.