Kunlun
Syllables: Kun·lun
Kunlun proper noun: a mountain range in China forming the border between the Tarim Basin to its north and the Tibetan Plateau to its south, extending across the Chinese autonomous regions of Xinjiang and Tibet and province of Qinghai.
Proper noun
Kunlun
- A mountain range in China forming the border between the Tarim Basin to its north and the Tibetan Plateau to its south, extending across the Chinese autonomous regions of Xinjiang and Tibet and province of Qinghai.
- Crossing the Altyn Tagh had proved hard enough, but no sooner had the travellers left those mountains behind and crossed the border into Tibet than they had plunged into the recesses of the Kunlun Mountains.1822, C. Bernard Rutley, “Zong”, in The Forbidden Land, Blackie & Son, →OCLC, page 90
- Between the Himalaya and the Kunlun to the north lies the very high plateau of Tibet, which is traversed by a number of smaller mountain chains.1944, Bernhard Haurwitz, James M. Austin, “Asia (Including Russia)”, in Climatology, McGraw-Hill Book Company, Inc., →OCLC, page 269
- A mythical mountain or mountain range somewhere west of the North China Plain believed to be the home of Xiwangmu and the Peaches of Immortality, as well as other gods and Taoist immortals, and previously believed to help support the dome of the sky.
- […] the Yellow Riuer […] is the other famous Riuer of that Kingdome, in greatneſſe and note, which ariſesth without the Kingdome to the Weſt, out of the Hill Cunlun, conjectured to bee the ſame whence Ganges ariſeth, or one neere to it.1625, [Samuel] Purchas, “A Generall Collection and Historical Representation of the Iesuites Entrance into Iapon and China, vntill Their Admission in the Royall Citie of Nanquin”, in Purchas His...
Examples of Kunlun in a sentence
- Everything inside a huge semicircle bounded on the west by the Yarkand River and the southeast by the Kunlun Mountains was shaded.1978, Hugh McLeave, A Borderline Case, New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, →ISBN, →LCCN, →OCLC, page 148:
- The peak is part of the Kongur Range in the Kunlun mountains in the region Xinjiang.2014 August 30, “First ascent of Kokodak Dome”, in Deutsche Welle, archived from the original on 09 Aug 2022:
- It appeared to us at twilight, in the hollow of a ledge, flanked to the north by the sharp incisors of the Kunlun peaks soaring to 6,000 meters, and to the south by the Changtang.2021 December 3, Liesl Schillinger, quoting Sylvain Tesson, “Books That Satisfy Your Yearning for Far-Off Places”, in The New York Times...
Forms of Kunlun
| alternative form | Kun Lun |
|---|---|
| alternative form | K'un-lun |
| alternative form | Kuen Lun |
| alternative form | Kwenlun |
| alternative form | Cunlun |
Origin of Kunlun
From the Mandarin 崑崙 /昆仑 (Kūnlún) and 崑崙山／昆仑山 (Kūnlún Shān), with the character 山 (shān) being an ambiguous reference to any raised place, inclusive of islands, hills, mountains, and mountain ranges. The characters 崑崙 /昆仑 (Kūnlún) are phono-semantic compounds adding 山 (shān) as a semantic component (形旁 (xíngpáng)) to the characters 昆 (kūn) and 侖／仑 (lún), which were presumably also homophones for Kunlun in Old Chinese—Zhengzhang's reconstructed pronunciation being /*kuːn.run/—but leaving its further development or original meaning uncertain. See also the Name section of the Wikipedia entry on the mythological Kunlun.
Words formed from Kunlun
Questions about Kunlun
- What does Kunlun mean?
- Kunlun means a mountain range in China forming the border between the Tarim Basin to its north and the Tibetan Plateau to its south, extending across the Chinese autonomous regions of Xinjiang and Tibet and province of Qinghai.
- How do you use Kunlun in a sentence?
- Everything inside a huge semicircle bounded on the west by the Yarkand River and the southeast by the Kunlun Mountains was shaded.
- What part of speech is Kunlun?
- Kunlun is a proper noun.
Words near Kunlun in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: Kunlun (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: “Kunlun.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/kunlun. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.