Yataghan
noun ·Rare ·Advanced level
Definitions
- 1 A type of sword used in Muslim countries from the mid-16th to late 19th centuries.
"The angry-faced official communicated the intelligence to a large group of Anadolian, Caramanian, Bosniac, and Roumelian Turks,— sturdy, undersized, broad-shouldered, bare-legged, splay-footed, horny-fisted, dark-browed, honest-looking mountaineers, who were lounging about with long pistols and yataghans stuck in their broad sashes [...]."
- 2 a long Turkish knife with a curved blade having a single edge wordnet
Synonyms
All synonymsExample
More examples"The angry-faced official communicated the intelligence to a large group of Anadolian, Caramanian, Bosniac, and Roumelian Turks,— sturdy, undersized, broad-shouldered, bare-legged, splay-footed, horny-fisted, dark-browed, honest-looking mountaineers, who were lounging about with long pistols and yataghans stuck in their broad sashes [...]."
Etymology
Borrowed from Ottoman Turkish یتاغان (modern Turkish yatağan), related to Old Turkic [script needed] (yat-, “to bend, incline; to lie”), whence also words like yatmak (“to lie”), yatak (“bed”), yatay (“horizontal”), etc.
More for "yataghan"
Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.