Word.ws English Dictionary

chieftains

chieftains is the plural of chieftain.

Meaning of chieftain

Noun

chieftain (plural chieftains)

  1. A leader of a clan or tribe.
    • VI. THE PUYUMA GROUP.
      The tribes belonging to this group occupy the plains in Hinan and that neighbourhood, and call themselves "Puyumas," but the Chinese call them the "Hinan Savages". The Puyumas formed a very powerful State some 300 years ago, and united under one single rule as many as seventy...1907, Yosaburo Takekoshi, “THE SAVAGES AND THEIR TERRITORY.”, in George Braithwaite, transl., Japanese Rule in Formosa, Longmans, Green, and Co., →OCLC, page 225
  2. (broadly) A leader of a group.
    • The robber chieftain divided up the spoils.

Questions about chieftains

What is chieftains the plural of?
Chieftains is the plural of chieftain.

Words near chieftains in the dictionary

  1. chieftainess
  2. chieftainesses
  3. chieftainly
  4. chieftainries
  5. chieftainry
  6. chieftains
  7. chieftainship
  8. chieftainships
  9. chieftess
  10. chieftesses
  11. Chieh

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: chieftains (page history and authors); chieftain (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.

Last updated:

Cite this entry: “chieftains.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/chieftains. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.