Loading page
say it: MID-eest
mideast is a noun meaning "the area around the eastern Mediterranean; from Turkey to northern Africa and eastward to Iran; the site of such ancient civilizations as Phoenicia and Babylon and Egypt and the birthplace of Judaism and Christianity and Islam; had continuous economic and political turmoil in the 20th century". It is pronounced /ˈmɪˌdist/ — MID-eest. It carries one recorded sense.
the area around the eastern Mediterranean; from Turkey to northern Africa and eastward to Iran; the site of such ancient civilizations as Phoenicia and Babylon and Egypt and the birthplace of Judaism and Christianity and Islam; had continuous economic and political turmoil in the 20th century
“the Middle East is the cradle of Western civilization”
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 mideast 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.