Burakumin

noun

noun ·Rare ·Advanced level

Definitions

Noun
  1. 1
    A member of a Japanese social minority group, descendants of feudal-era outcasts.

    "Since the early twentieth century, the burakumin have had strong liberation movements that have won many concessions for the group, but which have also, through their sometimes quite violent activism, further alienated many mainstream Japanese."

Synonyms

All synonyms
burakuburaku

Example

More examples

"Since the early twentieth century, the burakumin have had strong liberation movements that have won many concessions for the group, but which have also, through their sometimes quite violent activism, further alienated many mainstream Japanese."

Etymology

Borrowed from Japanese 部落民, from Middle Chinese 部落 (bu^X lak, “tribe”) + 民 (mjin, “people”).

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