Word.ws English Dictionary

tai-pan

tai-pan is the alternative form of taipan.

Meaning of taipan

Noun (1)

taipan (plural taipans)

  1. Any venomous elapid snake of the genus Oxyuranus, found in Australia and New Guinea.

Noun (2)

taipan (plural taipans)

  1. A foreign businessman in China; a tycoon.
    • Of course it was very sad, but the taipan could hardly help a smile when he thought how many of these young fellows he had drunk underground.1922, W. Somerset Maugham, The Taipan
  2. (Philippines) A tycoon (usually of Chinese Filipino background)

Forms of tai-pan

pluraltai-pans

Questions about tai-pan

What is tai-pan the alternative form of?
Tai-pan is the alternative form of taipan.

Words near tai-pan in the dictionary

  1. Tai'erzhuang
  2. tai-chi
  3. Tai-Kadai
  4. Tai-ngan
  5. Tai-p'ing
  6. tai-pan
  7. tai-pans
  8. Tai-pi
  9. Tai-ping
  10. tai-tai
  11. Tai-wan

Source and license

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