Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun A wealthy and powerful businessperson or industrialist; a magnate.
  • noun Used formerly as a title for a Japanese shogun.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun The title by which the shoguns of Japan were known to foreigners from the signing of the treaty negotiated in 1854 by Commodore Matthew Perry, on behalf of the United States, and Iyesada, the shogun and supposed “temporal emperor “of Japan, to the end of the shogunate in 1868, but never recognized by the Japanese.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • noun The title by which the shogun, or former commander in chief of the Japanese army, was known to foreigners.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun A wealthy and powerful business person.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • noun a very wealthy or powerful businessman

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[Japanese taikun, title of a shogun, Middle Chinese tɦaj` kyn, great prince : tɦaj` kyn, great (also the source of Mandarin ) + kyn, prince (also the source of Mandarin jūn).]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From Japanese 大君 (たいくん, taikun), a title for the shogun.

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Examples

Comments

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  • = big (gentle)man. (from Chinese) (This is possibly cheating as it might have come via Japanese)

    January 23, 2007

  • As a child I used to get this mixed up with typhoon.

    February 13, 2024