Word.ws English Dictionary

Sirayan

Sirayan adjective: pertaining to the Siraya tribe, an indigenous people of Taiwan.

Adjective

Sirayan (not comparable)

  1. Pertaining to the Siraya tribe, an indigenous people of Taiwan.
    • Sirayan pragmatism was obviously the key reason that they showed no desire to make a headlong rush into the new faith, but Candidius blamed the inibs for this recalcitrance.2008, Chiu Hsin-Hui, The Colonial 'civilizing Process' in Dutch Formosa: 1624 - 1662, →ISBN
    • Elements of its culture and language live on, and the association is striving to 'energise the Siraya tribe' and reconstruct the Sirayan language, the last native speaker having died c 1908.2010, Steven Crook, Taiwan: The Bradt Travel Guide, →ISBN, page 219

Noun

Sirayan (countable and uncountable, plural Sirayans)

  1. (countable) A member of the Siraya tribe.
    • In Sirayan society, the Reverend Candidius observed that the Sirayans had a different definition of "sins", which he considered were merely "fanciful inventions" not forbidden by the Law of God.2008, Chiu Hsin-Hui, The Colonial 'civilizing Process' in Dutch Formosa: 1624 - 1662, →ISBN, page 135
    • Unlike the Han people, who have traditionally preferred to bury their dead at times and in locations they consider auspicious, when a Sirayan died his or her body was first preserved by smoking, the buried under the floor of the family home.2010, Steven Crook, Taiwan: The Bradt Travel Guide, →ISBN, page 219
  2. (uncountable) The traditional language of the Sirayans.
    • While texts in Sirayan and other aboriginal languages are lost, there is still a substantial extant corpus of texts in Sinckan and Favorlang.2016, Ulrich L. Lehner, Richard A. Muller, A.G. Roeber, The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern Theology, 1600-1800, →ISBN

Forms of Sirayan

pluralSirayans

Origin of Sirayan

From Siraya + -an.

Questions about Sirayan

What does Sirayan mean?
Sirayan means pertaining to the Siraya tribe, an indigenous people of Taiwan.
What part of speech is Sirayan?
Sirayan can be an adjective or a noun.

Words near Sirayan in the dictionary

  1. Siravo
  2. Siravos
  3. Sirawai
  4. Siraya
  5. Sirayaic
  6. Sirayan
  7. Sirayans
  8. Sirač
  9. sirband
  10. sirbands
  11. Sirbonian

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: Sirayan (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.

Last updated:

Cite this entry: “Sirayan.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/sirayan. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.