Indic

adj, name

adj, name ·2 syllables ·Uncommon ·Advanced level

Definitions

Noun
  1. 1
    a branch of the Indo-Iranian family of languages wordnet
Adjective
  1. 1
    Relating to or denoting the group of Indo-European languages comprising Sanskrit and the modern Indian languages which are its descendants.
  2. 2
    Of or relating to indium. not-comparable

    "indic oxide"

  3. 3
    Relating to the Brahmic scripts.
  4. 4
    Pertaining to India or its people, culture and languages; Indian.

    "Clearly, men like ʿAin al-Mulk and Aravit Rama Raja could not have migrated successfully between the predominantly Islamicate world of Bijapur and Golconda and the more Indic world of Vijayanagara had they not been proficient in Telugu or Kannada as well as in Dakhni or Persian."

Proper Noun
  1. 1
    A branch of the Indo-European family of languages comprising Sanskrit and its modern descendants such as Bengali, Hindi, Urdu, and Punjabi.

    "Second, it is the only group that directly attests to a period of common development between two branches of the Indo-European family, namely, Indic and Iranian."

Example

More examples

"As English's Germanic substratum of short words is ameliorated with long Mediterranean loanwords, the Thai language with its short words is ameliorated with long Indic borrowings. Languages often have such vocabulary dichotomies. Japanese native words are longer than the Sinitic borrowings. Borrowed words in these languages often indicate a higher register."

Etymology

From Latin indicus from Ancient Greek ἰνδικός (indikós), from Ἰνδία (Indía). Doublet of indigo.

Related phrases

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