Word.ws English Dictionary

Cushite

Cushite adjective: pertaining to the ancient people of the Horn of Africa, historically considered the descendants of biblical Cush.

Adjective

Cushite (not comparable)

  1. Pertaining to the ancient people of the Horn of Africa, historically considered the descendants of biblical Cush.

Proper noun

Cushite

  1. The Cushitic subfamily of languages.
    • Similarly, in the Hamitic area, the Berber languages of the north-west are clearly distinguished from Ful, and these, again, from the Nilotic languages, which, in their turn, are quite distinct from the “Cushite” languages in the east (i.e. Somali, Galla, Saho, Bedauye, etc.).1915, Carl Meinhof, translated by A. Werner, An Introduction to the Study of African Languages, London: J. M. Dent & Sons, page 150
    • The numerous Cushite languages of East Africa make up another branch of Afroasiatic and can be separated for convenience into five subgroups—northern, central, eastern, western, and southern. […] The northern branch of Cushite consists of a number of closely related dialects of which Bedauye, the...1990, [Joseph H. Greenberg], “Internal a- Plurals in Afroasiatic (Hamito-Semitic) (1955)”, in Keith Denning, Suzanne Kemmer, editors, On Language: Selected Writings of Joseph H. Greenberg, Stanford...

Noun

Cushite (plural Cushites)

  1. (dated) A member of one of various peoples native to the Horn of Africa, generally restricted to those that speak Cushitic languages.

Cushite meaning in Arabic

Cushite in Arabic

pertaining to the ancient people of the Horn of Africa
كُوشِيّ kūšiyy, كُوشِيَّة kūšiyya

Forms of Cushite

Adjective
alternative formKushite
Noun
pluralCushites

Origin of Cushite

From Cush + -ite, coined in the 1820s. In the early 19th century, the term referred to the tan to dark-skinned people of the Horn of Africa (synonymous with Herodotus' Ethiopians) in general. The technical linguistic sense is due to Friedrich Müller (1876).

Words formed from Cushite

Questions about Cushite

What does Cushite mean?
Cushite means pertaining to the ancient people of the Horn of Africa, historically considered the descendants of biblical Cush.
What is Cushite in Arabic?
Cushite in Arabic is كُوشِيّ (kūšiyy), كُوشِيَّة (kūšiyya). See Cushite meaning in Arabic.
What part of speech is Cushite?
Cushite can be an adjective, a proper noun or a noun.

Words near Cushite in the dictionary

  1. cushionlike
  2. cushionlogging
  3. cushions
  4. cushions the blow
  5. cushiony
  6. Cushite
  7. Cushites
  8. Cushitic
  9. Cushiticist
  10. Cushiticists
  11. Cushiticness

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: Cushite (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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