acault
/ət͡ʃaʊ/
acault noun: a male who has special role in Myanmar folk religion and behaves in a way usually associated with women.
Noun
acault (plural acaults)
- A male who has special role in Myanmar folk religion and behaves in a way usually associated with women.
- According to a recent travelers' report (Coleman, Celgon, and Gooren, 1987), the hijra community of India (see this chapter) has a counterpart in Burma, where men who live as women are called acault (pronounced a·chow').[1988, John Money, Gay, Straight, and In-Between, →ISBN, page 100
- Because Manguedon is the spirit who controls success and good fortune, acault become an important intermediary between those seeking good fortune and success and the -^([sic]) spirit god.1990, Eli Coleman, “Paradigatic Changes in Our Understanding of Homosexuality”, in Sexology: An Independent Field, page 117
Forms of acault
| plural | acaults |
|---|
Origin of acault
A mistranslation of Burmese အခြောက် (a.hkrauk /ăhcauʔ/, “dry article; homosexual man”), from အ (a. /ă/, noun-forming prefix) + ခြောက် (hkrauk /hcauʔ/, “dry”). Apparently introduced before 1987 by Coleman et al. (see quotation below) who had an "inability to speak the local languages" and a "lack of training in anthropology".
Questions about acault
- What does acault mean?
- Acault means a male who has special role in Myanmar folk religion and behaves in a way usually associated with women.
- What part of speech is acault?
- Acault is a noun.
- How do you pronounce acault?
- Acault is pronounced /ət͡ʃaʊ/.
- What is the plural of acault?
- The plural of acault is acaults.
Words near acault in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: acault (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.
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Cite this entry: “acault.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/acault. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.