Word.ws English Dictionary

East Indies

East Indies proper noun: southeast Asia, especially Island Southeast Asia or Indonesia, but also including India, Indochina, Malaya and the Malay Archipelago, from the Philippines to Indonesia. Also the plural of East Indie.

Proper noun

East Indies pl (plural only)

  1. (plural, plural-only) Southeast Asia, especially Island Southeast Asia or Indonesia, but also including India, Indochina, Malaya and the Malay Archipelago, from the Philippines to Indonesia.

Also used as

East Indies is also the plural of East Indie.

Forms of East Indies

alternative formEast-Indies

Origin of East Indies

From east + Indies, a qualification added to distinguish the original lands and islands of "India" (inclusive of areas from Subsaharan Africa to Indonesia and Japan) from the "West Indies".

Words formed from East Indies

Questions about East Indies

What does East Indies mean?
East Indies means southeast Asia, especially Island Southeast Asia or Indonesia, but also including India, Indochina, Malaya and the Malay Archipelago, from the Philippines to Indonesia.
What part of speech is East Indies?
East Indies is a proper noun.

Words near East Indies in the dictionary

  1. East Indian Catholics
  2. East Indian plum
  3. East Indian rosebay
  4. East Indians
  5. East Indie
  6. East Indies
  7. East Indy
  8. East Insular
  9. East Islip
  10. East Jaintia Hills
  11. East Java

Source and license

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