Word.ws English Dictionary

prayer flag

prayer flag noun: a colourful rectangular cloth hung from a thread and strung along mountain ridges and peaks high in the Himalayas by practitioners of Tibetan Buddhism to bless the surrounding countryside or for other purposes.

prayer flag: a colourful rectangular cloth hung from a thread and strung along mountain ridges and peaks high in...
Image: Wotan, CC BY 2.5, via Wikimedia Commons

Noun

prayer flag (plural prayer flags)

  1. A colourful rectangular cloth hung from a thread and strung along mountain ridges and peaks high in the Himalayas by practitioners of Tibetan Buddhism to bless the surrounding countryside or for other purposes.
    • On the final night of his journey, he strung up the inflated balloons at Duchala, a sacred mountain pass at 10,000 feet, bobbing amidst Buddhist prayer flags.2011 November 6, Maria Popova, “'Balloons for Bhutan': Jonathan Harris Documents Happiness”, in The Atlantic
    • There are two kinds of prayer flags: horizontal ones, called Lung ta (Wylie: rlung-rta, meaning “Wind Horse”) in Tibetan, and vertical ones, called Darchor (Wylie: dar-Icog, meaning “flagstaff”).2017, Carol A. Wilson, Stillness on Shaking Ground: A Woman's Himalayan Journey Through Love, Loss, And Letting Go, John Hunt, →ISBN
    Synonyms:
    thangka

Synonyms of prayer flag

Forms of prayer flag

pluralprayer flags

Questions about prayer flag

What does prayer flag mean?
Prayer flag means a colourful rectangular cloth hung from a thread and strung along mountain ridges and peaks high in the Himalayas by practitioners of Tibetan Buddhism to bless the surrounding countryside or for other purposes.
What part of speech is prayer flag?
Prayer flag is a noun.
What is the plural of prayer flag?
The plural of prayer flag is prayer flags.

Words near prayer flag in the dictionary

  1. prayer candle
  2. prayer card
  3. prayer cards
  4. prayer circle
  5. prayer circles
  6. prayer flag
  7. prayer flags
  8. prayer for relief
  9. prayer mat
  10. prayer mats
  11. prayer meeting

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: prayer flag (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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