Word.ws English Dictionary

pontianac

pontianac noun: a fossil resin historically used in the production of some rubber, produced from the latex of Dyera costulata.

Noun

pontianac (countable and uncountable, plural pontianacs)

  1. A fossil resin historically used in the production of some rubber, produced from the latex of Dyera costulata.
    • A firm of manufacturers to whom a sample of the Galactodendron latex was submitted considered that the material could be used in the rubber industry as a substitute for pontianac.1919, Bulletin of the Imperial Institute - Volume 17, page 295
    • Some fifteen years ago enterprising technologists found that the rubber in pontianac was a very satisfactory material from the commercial standpoint, so much so that its extraction from the pontianac by deresination would be commercially sound, in view of the then obtaining price of crude rubber...1926, Lothar E. Weber, The Chemistry of Rubber Manufacture, page 22
    Synonyms:
    dead Borneo, gutta jelutong, gambria, jelutong, bresk, fluvia

Proper noun capitalized: Pontianac

Pontianac

  1. (obsolete) An older spelling of Pontianak city in West Kalimantan (Indonesia).

Synonyms of pontianac

Forms of pontianac

pluralpontianacs
alternative formpontianak

Origin of pontianac

From Pontianac, an older spelling of Pontianak, a port city in West Kalimantan, from which the resin was shipped, named for the ghostly pontianaks which supposedly once inhabited the site.

Words formed from pontianac

  • pontianac copal
  • pontianac gum
  • pontianac jelutong
  • pontianac resin
  • pontianac rubber

Questions about pontianac

What does pontianac mean?
Pontianac means a fossil resin historically used in the production of some rubber, produced from the latex of Dyera costulata.
What part of speech is pontianac?
Pontianac can be a noun or a proper noun.
What is the plural of pontianac?
The plural of pontianac is pontianacs.

Words near pontianac in the dictionary

  1. Ponthir
  2. Pontiac
  3. Pontiac fever
  4. Pontiacs
  5. Pontian
  6. pontianac
  7. pontianacs
  8. pontianak
  9. pontianaks
  10. pontic
  11. pontic rhododendron

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: pontianac (page history and authors); Pontianac (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: “pontianac.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/pontianac. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.