Taikonaut

//ˈtaɪkəˌnɔːt// noun

noun ·Rare ·Advanced level

Definitions

Noun
  1. 1
    A person who travels in space for the Chinese space program; a Chinese astronaut.

    "The past decade has seen remarkable events and changes: […] The Columbia disaster and a Chinese taikonaut in orbit"

Synonyms

All synonyms
astronautcosmonautspationaut

Example

More examples

"The past decade has seen remarkable events and changes: […] The Columbia disaster and a Chinese taikonaut in orbit"

Etymology

From Mandarin 太空 (tàikōng, “space”) + -naut, modelled after astronaut, cosmonaut, spationaut, etc. The term was coined on 19 May 1998 by Chiew Lee Yih (趙里昱 (Zhào Lǐyù)) from Malaysia, who used it first in newsgroups. Almost simultaneously, Chen Lan coined it for use in the Western media.

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