Word.ws English Dictionary

zendo

/ˈzɛndəʊ/

zendo noun: a hall at a Zen buddhist monastery where formal seated meditation (zazen) is practiced.

Noun

zendo (plural zendos)

  1. A hall at a Zen buddhist monastery where formal seated meditation (zazen) is practiced.
    • In the zendo, she settled herself in her teacher’s old seat and looked out over the room at the rows of meditators who were settling on their cushions, turning to face the smooth, white walls.2021, Ruth Ozeki, The Book of Form and Emptiness, Canongate Books (2022), page 408

Forms of zendo

pluralzendos
alternative formzendō

Origin of zendo

Borrowed from Japanese 禅堂 (zendō).

Questions about zendo

What does zendo mean?
Zendo means a hall at a Zen buddhist monastery where formal seated meditation (zazen) is practiced.
What part of speech is zendo?
Zendo is a noun.
How do you pronounce zendo?
Zendo is pronounced /ˈzɛndəʊ/.
What is the plural of zendo?
The plural of zendo is zendos.

Words near zendo in the dictionary

  1. zendics
  2. zendik
  3. zendiks
  4. zendiq
  5. zendiqs
  6. zendo
  7. zendos
  8. zendrum
  9. zendrums
  10. Zener
  11. Zener card

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: zendo (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: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Vealhurl-zendo.wav.

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