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say it: ahy-uh-TOH-luh
ayatollah is a noun meaning "a high-ranking Shiite religious leader who is regarded as an authority on religious law and its interpretation and who has political power as well". It is pronounced /ˌaɪəˈtoʊlə/ — ahy-uh-TOH-luh. It carries one recorded sense.
a high-ranking Shiite religious leader who is regarded as an authority on religious law and its interpretation and who has political power as well
Iran
Forms marked · are formed by the regular rule rather than recorded in the source data. English keeps a few hundred irregulars and the rest follow the pattern, so the rule is right far more often than not — but it is a rule, and the mark says so.
Definitions, synonyms and semantic relations for ayatollah come from Princeton University’s WordNet. The pronunciation comes from the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary. Commonness is measured against a corpus of everyday English. Full sources and licences.