Urdu
//ˈʊəɹduː// adj, name
adj, name ·Uncommon ·Advanced level
Definitions
Noun
- 1 the official literary language of Pakistan, closely related to Hindi; widely used in India (mostly by Muslims); written in Arabic script wordnet
Adjective
- 1 Of or relating to the Urdu language. not-comparable
Proper Noun
- 1 Modern Standard Urdu, an Indo-Aryan language with native speakers mainly in Pakistan and North India. It is a standardized and Persianized version of Hindustani.
"‘Urdu was born in the barracks a few hundred years ago, and was spoken by soldiers. It gets its grammar from Hindi, and vocabulary from Persian.’"
Example
More examples"Urdu and Punjabi are her native languages, but she speaks several others very well, including Tamil, Pashto, and Cantonese."
Etymology
Borrowed from Hindustani (see Urdu اُرْدُو (urdū) and Hindi उर्दू (urdū)), from Classical Persian اُرْدُو (urdū), from Proto-Turkic *ordu (“army, camp”) ( > Azerbaijani ordu, Turkish ordu, Turkmen oorda). Doublet of horde and orda.
Related phrases
More for "urdu"
Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.