Word.ws English Dictionary

Bir Tawil

Bir Tawil proper noun: a region of Africa, along the border between Egypt and Sudan, currently considered as terra nullius. It is declared by Egypt to be Sudanese and Sudan to be Egyptian, and claimed by neither country.

Proper noun

Bir Tawil

  1. A region of Africa, along the border between Egypt and Sudan, currently considered as terra nullius. It is declared by Egypt to be Sudanese and Sudan to be Egyptian, and claimed by neither country.
    • In practice, Bir Tawil is widely believed to have the legal status of terra nullius – “nobody’s land” – and there is nothing else quite like it on the planet. […] Their ties to the area may be based on traditional rather than written claims – but Bir Tawil is not any more a “no man’s land” than the...2016 March 3, Jack Shenker, “Welcome to the land that no country wants”, in The Guardian, archived from the original on 06 Apr 2020

Synonyms of Bir Tawil

Origin of Bir Tawil

Borrowed from Arabic بِير طَوِيل (bīr ṭawīl) or بِئْر طَوِيل (biʔr ṭawīl, literally “tall water well”).

Questions about Bir Tawil

What does Bir Tawil mean?
Bir Tawil means a region of Africa, along the border between Egypt and Sudan, currently considered as terra nullius. It is declared by Egypt to be Sudanese and Sudan to be Egyptian, and claimed by neither country.
What part of speech is Bir Tawil?
Bir Tawil is a proper noun.

Words near Bir Tawil in the dictionary

  1. biquintile
  2. biquintiles
  3. biquotient
  4. biquotients
  5. BIR
  6. Bir Tawil
  7. Bir Tawil Triangle
  8. bir-
  9. biracial
  10. biracialism
  11. biraciality

Source and license

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