Asian
adjective
of or relating to or characteristic of Asia or the peoples of Asia or their languages or culture
- “Asian countries”
denoting or characteristic of the biogeographic region including southern Asia and the Malay Archipelago as far as the Philippines and Borneo and Java
- “Oriental politeness”
- “for people of South and East Asian ancestry the term”
- “is preferred to”
- “;”
noun
a native or inhabitant of Asia
Origin
From Latin āsiānus. By surface analysis, Asia + -an. The modern North American and Australasian usage, referring to East and Southeast Asians collectively, seems to be a shortened form of "Asian American", a term whose origins activists and academics trace back to 1968 and University of California, Berkeley (UCLA) students Yuji Ichioka and Emma Gee, who, inspired by the Black Power Movement and the protests against the Vietnam War, founded the "Asian American Political Alliance" as a way to unite Japanese, Chinese, and Filipino American students on campus. It replaced the term "Mongoloid", but still continued the racial grouping of "Mongoloid". The usage in Britain and some of its former colonies such as South Africa, Kenya and Uganda, stems from South Asians historically forming the bulk of immigrants from the continent of Asia to these places. In the rest of the Anglosphere, the word "Asian" is sometimes, albeit less frequently, used to refer to South Asians and Central Asians, but rarely (if ever) to Near Easterners.
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Pertaining to
WordNet 2.1 (Princeton University). Wiktionary (CC BY-SA). CMU Pronouncing Dictionary. WordNet 2.1 Copyright Princeton University. All rights reserved. Wiktionary content is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike Licence.