Word.ws English Dictionary

Karaim

Karaim proper noun: a Kipchak Turkic language, with Aramaic and Persian influences, spoken in Lithuania, Poland, the Crimea and the Ukraine. Also the collective plural of Karaim.

Proper noun

Karaim

  1. A Kipchak Turkic language, with Aramaic and Persian influences, spoken in Lithuania, Poland, the Crimea and the Ukraine.
    • At times the discrepancy can be even greater: only 12.8% of the Karaim, a Turkic-speaking group living for the most part in Lithuania, declared Karaim as their native language.1981, Bernard Comrie, The Languages of the Soviet Union, page 2
    • For more than six hundred years, Karaim has been spoken as a community language in what is today Lithuania.2001, Éva Ágnes Csató, “Syntactic code-copying in Karaim”, in Östen Dahl, Maria Koptjevskaja-Tamm, editors, The Circum-Baltic Languages: Typology and Contact, volume 1, →ISBN, page 271

Noun

Karaim (plural Karaims or Karaim)

  1. A member of an ethnic group in Central and Eastern Europe which traditionally spoke this (Turkic) language and practiced Karaite Judaism.
    • He began to develop closer relations with his Karaim subjects and issued a charter to a Karaim named Iosif to try again to establish a mint. The Karaim Rabbi wrote that after the Christians had left, […]1970, Alan W. Fisher, The Russian Annexation of the Crimea 1772-1783 →ISBN, page 120
    • The term Karaim refers to both a people and to a religious system. Karaims are believers in the Old Testament but consider themselves to be of Turkic ethnic origin. They have traditionally used the Hebrew alphabet for writing their language, […]1998, Lars Johanson, The Turkic Languages, →ISBN, page 8
  2. (rare) A Karaite (especially an Eastern or Central European, Turkic-speaking one).
    • He added that he was not "one of those Talmud Jews"; that he belonged to the American Reformed Church, known in Russia as the Karaim Jews. […] As soon as General Kosloff understood that Moses was a Karaim Jew, he told the consul-general to send the man to him the next morning […]1882 January 9, Wickham Hoffman, in a letter to Mr. Frelinghuysen, published in the Index to the Executive Documents of the House of Representatives for the Second Session of the Forty-Seventh...

Also used as

Karaim is also the collective plural of Karaim.

Forms of Karaim

pluralKaraims
pluralKaraim

Questions about Karaim

What does Karaim mean?
Karaim means a Kipchak Turkic language, with Aramaic and Persian influences, spoken in Lithuania, Poland, the Crimea and the Ukraine.
What part of speech is Karaim?
Karaim can be a proper noun or a noun.

Words near Karaim in the dictionary

  1. Karai
  2. Karai-Karai
  3. Karaikal
  4. karaila
  5. karailas
  6. Karaim
  7. Karaims
  8. Karaism
  9. karait
  10. Karaite
  11. Karaites

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: Karaim (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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