Word.ws English Dictionary

Devdas

Devdas noun: a grieving male lover.

Noun

Devdas (plural Devdases)

  1. (India) A grieving male lover.
    • "I don't know," he had said and sighed, Devdas style: "I don't know," Everyone wants to be a Devdas, at least for a while — or perhaps only for a while. Tragic hero.1980, Sāhitya Akademi, Indian Literature, volume 23, page 539
    • It reminds me very much of the Devdas character that so suffuses Indian cinema, not just in the 1935 and 1955 film versions, but as a 'Devdas effect' in Hindi melodramas, especially those of Raj Kapoor and Guru Dutt.1996, Bruce Bennett, Crossing Cultures: Essays on Literature and Culture of the Asia-Pacific

Examples of Devdas in a sentence

  • Indians everywhere recognized that when somebody pined, longed, and raged for someone else, they were "doing a Devdas."2007, Anupama Chopra, King of Bollywood: Shah Rukh Khan and the Seductive World of Indian Cinema:
  • The character of Kashyap's Dev, although it is built on the same model as traditional Devdases, is different and suffers for other reasons.2017, Cornelius Crowley, Heritage and Ruptures in Indian Literature, Culture and Cinema, page 198:

Forms of Devdas

pluralDevdases

Origin of Devdas

Borrowed from Hindi देवदास (devdās) or Bengali দেবদাস (debdaś), the name of the male lead in the 1917 Bengali-language story Devdas, readapted several times since.

Questions about Devdas

What does Devdas mean?
Devdas means a grieving male lover.
How do you use Devdas in a sentence?
Indians everywhere recognized that when somebody pined, longed, and raged for someone else, they were "doing a Devdas."
What part of speech is Devdas?
Devdas is a noun.
What is the plural of Devdas?
The plural of Devdas is Devdases.

Words near Devdas in the dictionary

  1. devazepide
  2. devazipide
  3. Devbandi
  4. Devbhoomi Dwarka
  5. devdar
  6. Devdas
  7. Devdases
  8. Deveaux
  9. Deveauxes
  10. Devedjian
  11. Devedjians

Source and license

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