dayan
dayan noun: a rabbinic judge.
Noun
dayan (plural dayans or dayanim)
- A rabbinic judge.
- A medieval hymn composed by the Dayyan ("Judge") Daniel b. Yehudah of fourteenth-century Rome, recited in the daily morning Preliminary Service, and by some, at the close of the Arvit and Musaf services on Shabbat and festivals.1996, Macy Nulman, The Encyclopedia of Jewish Prayer, page 375
- There is a famous story about Rabbi Yisrael Salanter who ate on the Bimah in Vilna at the end of the Yom Kippur morning service in 1848 during a cholera epidemic, together with two other Dayyanim, to persuade the congregation to eat during the epidemic.2024, David Golinkin, “Does Jewish Law Require Yeshivah Students To Be Drafted At Age 18?”, in Responsa in a Moment, volume 4, page 66
Proper noun capitalized: Dayan
Dayan (plural Dayans)
- A surname from Hebrew.
- The Samson Option states that Moshe Dayan gave the go-ahead for starting weapon production in early 1968, putting the plutonium separation plant into full operation.2009 June 7, Filipe, CNN, archived from the original on 01 Feb 2023
Forms of dayan
| Noun | |
|---|---|
| plural | dayans |
| plural | dayanim |
| alternative form | dayyan |
| Proper noun | |
| plural | Dayans |
Origin of dayan
Borrowed from Hebrew דיין.
Jewish surname from Hebrew דַּיָּן (“rabbinic judge”).
Questions about dayan
- What does dayan mean?
- Dayan means a rabbinic judge.
- What part of speech is dayan?
- Dayan can be a noun or a proper noun.
- What is the plural of dayan?
- The plural of dayan is dayans.
Words near dayan in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: dayan (page history and authors); Dayan (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: “dayan.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/dayan. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.