Word.ws English Dictionary

Gunga Din

Gunga Din noun: a water carrier (person employed to carry water).

Noun

Gunga Din (plural Gunga Dins)

  1. (dated, slang) A water carrier (person employed to carry water).
  2. (ironic, sometimes) A person who selflessly serves another.

Forms of Gunga Din

pluralGunga Dins

Origin of Gunga Din

From an 1890 poem by Rudyard Kipling about an Indian water-carrier, Gunga Din, who saves a wounded soldier before being killed, remembered for its closing line: "You're a better man than I am, Gunga Din."

Questions about Gunga Din

What does Gunga Din mean?
Gunga Din means a water carrier (person employed to carry water).
What part of speech is Gunga Din?
Gunga Din is a noun.
What is the plural of Gunga Din?
The plural of Gunga Din is Gunga Dins.

Words near Gunga Din in the dictionary

  1. gunfuls
  2. gung
  3. gung ho
  4. gung-ho
  5. gunga
  6. Gunga Din
  7. Gunga Dins
  8. Gungal
  9. Gungalman
  10. gunge
  11. gunged

Source and license

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