Word.ws English Dictionary

durwan

durwan noun: a live-in doorkeeper, especially in an apartment building.

Noun

durwan (plural durwans)

  1. (India) A live-in doorkeeper, especially in an apartment building.
    • Old Mattu, the Hindu durwan who looked after the European church, was standing in the sunlight below the veranda.1934, George Orwell, chapter 3, in Burmese Days
    • Outside my retreat, our house was full of relatives and other people. […] Mukundalal the durwan is outside rolling on the ground with the one-eyed wrestler, trying out a new wrestling fall.1940, Rabindranath Tagore, “My Boyhood Days”, in Amiya Chakravarty, editor, A Tagore Reader, Boston: Beacon Press, published 1966, page 94

Forms of durwan

pluraldurwans

Origin of durwan

From Hindustani دروان (drvān) / दरवान (darvān), from Classical Persian دروان (darwān), from دربان (darbān, “doorkeeper”), from در (dar, “door”) + ـبان (-bān, “keeper, guardian”).

Questions about durwan

What does durwan mean?
Durwan means a live-in doorkeeper, especially in an apartment building.
What part of speech is durwan?
Durwan is a noun.
What is the plural of durwan?
The plural of durwan is durwans.

Words near durwan in the dictionary

  1. Duruwa
  2. durva
  3. durvalumab
  4. Durvasa
  5. durving
  6. durwan
  7. durwans
  8. durwaun
  9. durwauns
  10. durwaza bund
  11. Durweston

Source and license

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