ghat
UK/ɡɔːt/
More pronunciations (1)Fewer pronunciations
South Asia/ɡʱaːʈ/
ghat noun: a descending path or stairway to a river; a ford or landing-place. Also the alternative form of ghut.
Noun
ghat (plural ghats)
- A descending path or stairway to a river; a ford or landing-place.
- The abrupt escarpment of the western Ghats condenses so much of the moisture of the south-west monsoon1855, Joseph Dalton Hooker, Flora Indica
- Chunks of wood were being built into funeral pyres on the steps of the ghat that went down into the water; four bodies were burning on the ghat steps when we got there.2008, Aravind Adiga, The White Tiger, Atlantic, published 2009, page 16
- A burning-ghat.
- On the steps of the Manikarnika ghat—the holiest of the city’s stepped riverbanks, upon which Hindu dead are cremated—the fires are already lit, and mourners assemble by the hundred to accompany their loved ones at the end.2023 November 30, Oliver Franklin-Wallis, “Inside India’s Gargantuan Mission to Clean the Ganges River”, in Wired, →ISSN
- A mountain pass.
- A mountain range.
- And farther south, in the interior of the Peninsula, in the elevated tract from 1200 to 2400 feet above the sea, between the Eastern and Western Ghats1885, Edward Balfour, Cyclopaedia of India
Also used as
ghat is also the alternative form of ghut.
Forms of ghat
| plural | ghats |
|---|---|
| alternative form | ghât |
| alternative form | ghát |
| alternative form | ghaut |
Origin of ghat
Borrowed from Hindi घाट (ghāṭ, “flight of steps leading to a river; mountain pass”), from Sanskrit घट्ट (ghaṭṭa, “a landing-place, steps on the side of a river leading to the waters”), from Dravidian. Compare Telugu గట్టు (gaṭṭu, “dam, embankment”), కట్ట (kaṭṭa, “dam, embankment”), derived from కట్టు (kaṭṭu, “to tie”).
Words that rhyme with ghat
Questions about ghat
- What does ghat mean?
- Ghat means a descending path or stairway to a river; a ford or landing-place.
- What part of speech is ghat?
- Ghat is a noun.
- How do you pronounce ghat?
- Ghat is pronounced /ɡɔːt/ (UK).
- What is the plural of ghat?
- The plural of ghat is ghats.
Words near ghat in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: ghat (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:
Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Sumxr-ghat.wav.
Cite this entry: “ghat.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/ghat. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.