jialat
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Singapore/ˌt͡s˭jɑːˈlʌt/
jialat adjective: sapping one’s strength; tiresome.
Adjective
jialat (comparative more jialat, superlative most jialat)
- Sapping one’s strength; tiresome.
- wah lao...... jialat ahhhh you.1997 October 19, Thye Hoon Lin, “Singapore Ties to Heroin Traffickers: News Release”, in soc.culture.malaysia (Usenet)
- None of the economists polled expect the economy to contract - be it a technical recession or a real recession - and hit the alamak and jialat ranges.2015 December 17, Kelly Tay Soon Weilun, “The Singapore economy, colloquially speaking”, in Business Times, →OCLC
- Terrible, disastrous; (of a person) affected by difficulties, in a dire situation.
- Jialat, jialat (very serious). This one jialat. Tell me about it man. Did you use it?2006, Elangovan, Smegma, Singapore, →ISBN, →OCLC, page 25
- According to his doctors, every minute he had remained unconscious would have added to his life being in danger. "If it were 10 minutes... jialat (terrible)!" he said.2019 March 2, Lyn Chan, “When an emergency hits, will you know what to do?”, in Today
Forms of jialat
| comparative | more jialat |
|---|---|
| superlative | most jialat |
| alternative form | chialat |
Origin of jialat
Borrowed from Hokkien 食力 (chia̍h-la̍t, “to be exhausting”), with spelling influenced by Mandarin Pinyin.
Questions about jialat
- What does jialat mean?
- Jialat means sapping one’s strength; tiresome.
- What part of speech is jialat?
- Jialat is an adjective.
- How do you pronounce jialat?
- Jialat is pronounced /ˌt͡s˭jɑːˈlʌt/ (Singapore).
Words near jialat in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: jialat (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: “jialat.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/jialat. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.