Taliban

//ˈtælɪbæn// name, noun

name, noun ·Uncommon ·Advanced level

Definitions

Noun
  1. 1
    A Taliban militia.

    "We will deal with the Afghan Taliban through dialogue. And we will handle the Pakistani Taliban with bullets."

  2. 2
    a fundamentalist Islamic militia; in 1995 the Taliban militia took over Afghanistan and in 1996 took Kabul and set up an Islamic government wordnet
  3. 3
    A member of the Taliban movement or its militia; a Talib.
Proper Noun
  1. 1
    A Deobandi Islamist and largely Pashtun religious political movement founded in Afghanistan in 1994 by mullah Mohammad Omar, which has governed the country from 1996 to 2001 and since 2021.

Synonyms

All synonyms
taleban

Example

More examples

"Over seven years ago, the United States pursued al Qaeda and the Taliban with broad international support. We did not go by choice, we went because of necessity."

Etymology

Borrowed from Pashto طالبان (tālibān, “students, seekers”), plural of طالب (tālib), from Arabic طَالِب (ṭālib, “seeker, student”).

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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.