Pakistan
name ·Uncommon ·Advanced level
Definitions
- 1 A country in South Asia. Official name: Islamic Republic of Pakistan. Capital: Islamabad.
"Described by witnesses as a keen cricketer and pubgoer until contacts with Islamic militants radicalized him on a trip to Pakistan, he was ordered to serve at least 14 years for the plot, and for supplying militants in Afghanistan with money and equipment."
Example
More examples"He came to see me all the way from Pakistan."
Etymology
Borrowed from Urdu پاکستان (pākistān, “Land of the Holy”), from پاک (pāk, “pure, holy, immaculate, chaste, undefiled”) and Classical Persian ـستان (-stān,-istān, “-stan”). The word was coined by Pakistani politician Chuhdary Rahmat Ali in 1933, who published it in the pamphlet Now or Never as an acronym of the names of the "Muslim homelands" of western India—Punjab, Afghania, Kashmir, Sindh, and Balochistan. Absent from said acronym (which may possibly be a backronym) is the letter ⟨i⟩, which is sometimes erroneously said to stand for the Indus, but it is in fact epenthetic.
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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.