Word.ws English Dictionary

Zomia

Zomia proper noun: highland areas of the Indochina region of peninsular Southeast Asia that are historically outside the control of governments based in the population centres in the lowlands.

Proper noun

Zomia

  1. (neologism) Highland areas of the Indochina region of peninsular Southeast Asia that are historically outside the control of governments based in the population centres in the lowlands.

Origin of Zomia

Coined by Dutch historian Willem van Schendel in 2002 on the basis of the Kuki-Chin roots zo ‘hill’ and mi ‘person’.

Words formed from Zomia

  • Zomian

Questions about Zomia

What does Zomia mean?
Zomia means highland areas of the Indochina region of peninsular Southeast Asia that are historically outside the control of governments based in the population centres in the lowlands.
What part of speech is Zomia?
Zomia is a proper noun.

Words near Zomia in the dictionary

  1. zomepirac
  2. zomes
  3. ZOMFG
  4. zomg
  5. Zomi
  6. Zomia
  7. zomma
  8. zomo
  9. zomos
  10. zomotherapeutic
  11. zomotherapy

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: Zomia (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.

Last updated:

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