Babylonian
adj, name, noun ·Moderate ·College level
Definitions
- 1 An inhabitant of the city of Babylon.
- 2 the ideographic and syllabic writing system in which the ancient Babylonian language was written wordnet
- 3 An inhabitant of Babylonia, which included Chaldea; a Chaldean.
- 4 an inhabitant of ancient Babylon wordnet
- 5 An astrologer; so called because the Chaldeans were remarkable for the study of astrology.
- 1 Pertaining to the city of Babylon, or the Babylonian Empire. historical, not-comparable
- 2 Roman Catholic (with reference to e.g. Revelation 14–18). derogatory, not-comparable, obsolete
"[W]e, on our parts, have learned to speak only the primitive language of the law, and not the confused jargon of their Babylonian pulpits."
- 3 Characteristic of Babylon or its civilization and inhabitants; huge, decadent, indulgent. . not-comparable
"The first was in the Babylonian halls of the big hotel, which was the meeting place of the three commercial magnates concerned with arranging for a coal lock-out and denouncing it as a coal strike,"
- 1 of or relating to the city of Babylon or its people or culture wordnet
- 1 A later form of the Akkadian language spoken in Babylonia from 1950 BCE to 100 CE.
Example
More examples"But who really invented the stories nobody knows; it is all so long ago, long before reading and writing were invented. The first of the stories actually written down, were written in Egyptian hieroglyphs, or on Babylonian cakes of clay, three or four thousand years before our time."
Etymology
From Latin Babylōnius (“of Babylon, Babylonian”) (from Ancient Greek Βαβυλώνιος (Babulṓnios)) + -an. By surface analysis, Babylon + -ian. Piecewise doublet of Babelian.
Related phrases
More for "babylonian"
Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.