Word.ws English Dictionary

tumtum

tumtum noun: one whose gender can not be determined by a physical examination; a person lacking external genitalia; an androgynous person; sometimes a hermaphrodite, possibly intersex. Also the alternative form of tum-tum.

Noun (1)

tumtum (plural tumtums)

  1. (Judaism) One whose gender can not be determined by a physical examination; a person lacking external genitalia; an androgynous person; sometimes a hermaphrodite, possibly intersex.
    • Therefore, if a man died leaving a son and a tumtum or a hermaphrodyte, the son inherits everything, since the heirship of the tumtum or of the hermaphrodyte is doubtful.1949 (printing), Maimonides, The Code of Maimonides: The Book of Civil Laws, p. 273
    • As it happens, the baraita in question speaks of the tumtum twice, introducing an apparent redundancy into the text. To be specific, Abbaye's solution, proposing an unusual interpretation of the first tumtum ("his testicles are evident from the outside"), allows for a different reading of tumtum in...1996, David Charles Kraemer, Reading the Rabbis: the Talmud as Literature, page 122
  2. (Judaism, broadly, rare) A Jewish person who is also non-binary and/or intersex.

Noun (2)

tumtum (plural tumtums)

  1. A toombah, a type of small drum used in the traditional music of Antigua and Barbuda.

Also used as

tumtum is also the alternative form of tum-tum.

Examples of tumtum in a sentence

  • As it happens, the baraita in question speaks of the tumtum twice, introducing an apparent redundancy into the text.1996, David Charles Kraemer, Reading the Rabbis: the Talmud as Literature, page 122:
  • A tumtum and a hermaphrodite should not dress like a woman, but neither should they cut the hair on their head like a man.2001, Ruth N. Sandberg, Development and Discontinuity in Jewish Law, page 100:
  • DEFINITION OF THE TERM The term tumtum, meaning ambiguous genitalia, is not found in Scripture.2003, Avraham Steinberg, Fred Rosner, Encyclopedia of Jewish Medical Ethics, page 50:

Forms of tumtum

pluraltumtums

Origin of tumtum

From Hebrew טומטום.

Questions about tumtum

What does tumtum mean?
Tumtum means one whose gender can not be determined by a physical examination; a person lacking external genitalia; an androgynous person; sometimes a hermaphrodite, possibly intersex.
How do you use tumtum in a sentence?
As it happens, the baraita in question speaks of the tumtum twice, introducing an apparent redundancy into the text.
What part of speech is tumtum?
Tumtum is a noun.
What is the plural of tumtum?
The plural of tumtum is tumtums.

Words near tumtum in the dictionary

  1. tumpy
  2. tums
  3. tumshie
  4. tumshies
  5. tumstatin
  6. tumtum
  7. tumtums
  8. tumular
  9. tumulary
  10. tumulate
  11. tumulated

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: tumtum (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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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: En-au-tumtum.ogg.

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