Word.ws English Dictionary

Biafran

Biafran adjective: of, from or relating to Biafra.

Adjective

Biafran (comparative more Biafran, superlative most Biafran)

  1. Of, from or relating to Biafra.
  2. (derogatory) Extremely skinny.
    • "He looked Biafran, he looked HIV-positive," Suzanne said, "Contrary to what the doctors were worried about, I believe those kids were keeping him alive."2006, Stephen P. Kiernan, Last Rights: Rescuing the End of Life from the Medical System
    • She was truly skinny now and in this defenseless. She had surpassed fashionable and veered into unhealth. She looked Biafran; her eyes seemed to bulge out of her head.2007, Wendy Rawlings, The Agnostics, page 111

Noun

Biafran (plural Biafrans)

  1. A native or inhabitant of Biafra.

Forms of Biafran

Adjective
comparativemore Biafran
superlativemost Biafran
Noun
pluralBiafrans

Origin of Biafran

From Biafra + -an. The "skinny" sense is in reference to the images of extremely skinny Biafran refugees from the Nigerian Civil War that appeared plentifully in English-language media in the 1960s and 1970s.

Questions about Biafran

What does Biafran mean?
Biafran means of, from or relating to Biafra.
What part of speech is Biafran?
Biafran can be an adjective or a noun.

Words near Biafran in the dictionary

  1. biadjunction
  2. biadjunctions
  3. Biafara
  4. biaffine
  5. Biafra
  6. Biafran
  7. Biafrans
  8. Biagini
  9. Biaginis
  10. Biainili
  11. biajaca

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: Biafran (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: “Biafran.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/biafran. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.