Word.ws English Dictionary

yangban

UK/ˈjaŋban/

yangban noun: a member of the ruling class of male Confucian intellectuals in Korea at and before the time of the Korean Empire.

Noun

yangban (plural yangbans or yangban)

  1. (historical) A member of the ruling class of male Confucian intellectuals in Korea at and before the time of the Korean Empire.
    • One yangban, Yi Sŭng-hun, provided a new answer to this crisis of authority: while in Beijing serving as a diplomat, he was baptized a Catholic Christian and went home to propagate his faith.2009, Diarmaid MacCulloch, A History of Christianity, Penguin, published 2010, page 900

Forms of yangban

pluralyangbans
pluralyangban

Origin of yangban

Borrowed from Korean 양반(兩班) (yangban).

Questions about yangban

What does yangban mean?
Yangban means a member of the ruling class of male Confucian intellectuals in Korea at and before the time of the Korean Empire.
What part of speech is yangban?
Yangban is a noun.
How do you pronounce yangban?
Yangban is pronounced /ˈjaŋban/ (UK).
What is the plural of yangban?
The plural of yangban is yangbans.

Words near yangban in the dictionary

  1. Yang-tze
  2. Yang-tzu
  3. Yang-tzŭ
  4. Yanga
  5. yangambin
  6. yangban
  7. yangbans
  8. Yangcheng
  9. Yangchow
  10. Yangchu
  11. Yangchüan

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: yangban (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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