Xi'an
name ·Rare ·Advanced level
Definitions
- 1 The provincial capital of Shaanxi, China; a subprovincial city in central China famed as the former capital of numerous Chinese dynasties, also known as Chang'an among other historical names.
"THE SILK ROAD was actually a perilous network of routes. It was hazardous to monks and pilgrims carrying Buddhist teachings between India and China and even more hazardous to traders, who intended to exchange gold, wool, horses, jade, and glass for silk. The road started in what is now Xi'an, in Shaanxi Province, traversed a barren crust of earth through treacherous mountains and desert across Central Asia to Antioch and Tyre; the last lap, to Europe and Egypt, was by water to other Mediterranean ports."
- 2 A district of Liaoyuan, Jilin, China.
"In February 2009, the Xi’an District People’s Court in Liaoyuan city, Jilin province, reported that when preparing for a trial involving Falun Gong and other “cult organizations,” the court must first “petition” the municipal 6-10 Office, and only after receiving an affirmative response is the court then permitted to hear the case."
Example
More examples"The Chinese city Xi'an attracts many tourists with the famous terracotta warriors and horses museum."
Etymology
The atonal Hanyu Pinyin romanization of the Mandarin pronunciation of Chinese 西安 (Xī'ān), usually glossed as meaning "Western Peace" but inclusive of the idea of "Western Pacification" or "Pacified Area", first adopted under the Ming Dynasty in 1369 as the city was conquered from the Yuan and protected with a new wall. An apostrophe is usually required in pinyin to mark any non-initial syllable beginning with a, o, or e in a multi-syllable word. (See 隔音符號 /隔音符号 (géyīn fúhào) for more.) In this case, the apostrophe happens to distinguish the two separate syllables of xī and ān from the monosyllabic words xiān, xián, xiǎn, and xiàn.
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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.