Word.ws English Dictionary

Emishi

Emishi noun: an ancient ethnic group of northeastern Honshū in the Tōhoku region of Japan.

Noun

Emishi pl (plural only)

  1. (historical, plural, plural-only) An ancient ethnic group of northeastern Honshū in the Tōhoku region of Japan.
    • This area was one of the last pieces of tribal land to be taken from the indigenous Emishi, descendants of the Jōmon people, who had lived there from prehistoric times until they were defeated by the Japanese Imperial Army in the eighth century.2013, Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being, Canongate Books (2019), page 151
    Synonyms:
    Ebisu, Ezo

Synonyms of Emishi

Forms of Emishi

alternative formYemishi

Origin of Emishi

From Japanese 蝦夷 (Emishi, literally “shrimp barbarians”).

Questions about Emishi

What does Emishi mean?
Emishi means an ancient ethnic group of northeastern Honshū in the Tōhoku region of Japan.
What part of speech is Emishi?
Emishi is a noun.

Words near Emishi in the dictionary

  1. emirships
  2. EMIs
  3. emisary
  4. Emisene
  5. Emisenes
  6. Emishi
  7. Emison
  8. emissaria
  9. emissarial
  10. emissaries
  11. emissarium

Source and license

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