Word of the Day:
shaman
What It Means
A member of certain tribal societies who acts as a spiritual or religious medium between the concrete and spirit worlds; sometimes also a healer.
Shaman: Becoming the shaman is excruciating. I passed through rites that made me wish to die. I carry the scars on my soul.
Shaman in Context
“Shaman: I must perform rites each dawn and dusk to keep me bound into our krogan nature. Our spirit is one of violence and death. I must be attuned to that.”
Did You Know?
Borrowed from German Schamane, from Russian шама́н (šamán), from Evenki шама̄н (şamān), сама̄н (samān), from Proto-Tungusic *samān. The Evenki word is possibly derived from the root ша- (şa-, “to know”); or else a loanword from Tocharian B ṣamāne (“monk”) or Chinese 沙門 /沙门 (shāmén, “Buddhist monk”), from Pali samaṇa from Sanskrit श्रमण (śramaṇa, “ascetic, monk, devotee”), from श्रम (śrama, “weariness, exhaustion; labor, toil; etc.”), which would make this a doublet of sramana.
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: shaman (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws chose the word and reformatted its meaning, examples and origin.
Cite this entry: “shaman.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/shaman. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.
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