Word.ws English Dictionary

romusha

romusha noun: a forced laborer, especially one of those made to work in the Dutch East Indies under Japanese occupation during the Second World War.

Noun

romusha (plural romusha or romushas)

  1. A forced laborer, especially one of those made to work in the Dutch East Indies under Japanese occupation during the Second World War.
    • Javanese workers were known as romushas (the Japanese translation for the colonial term ‘coolie’) and put to work on Java, its neighbouring islands and across Southeast Asia.2017, Lizzie Oliver, “‘Like Pebbles Stuck in a Sieve’: Reading Romushas in the Second-Generation Photography of Southeast Asian Captivity”, in Journal of War & Culture Studies, volume 10, →DOI, page...

Forms of romusha

pluralromusha
pluralromushas
alternative formrōmusha

Origin of romusha

From Japanese 労務者 (rōmusha, “laborer; forced laborer”). Compare Indonesian romusa.

Questions about romusha

What does romusha mean?
Romusha means a forced laborer, especially one of those made to work in the Dutch East Indies under Japanese occupation during the Second World War.
What part of speech is romusha?
Romusha is a noun.
What is the plural of romusha?
The plural of romusha is romusha.

Words near romusha in the dictionary

  1. Romulans
  2. Romulean
  3. Romulian
  4. Romulus
  5. Romuluses
  6. romusha
  7. romushas
  8. Romuva
  9. Romy
  10. Románico
  11. Romániço

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: romusha (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: “romusha.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/romusha. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.