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Cantonese

adjectivenounattested in dialogue

  • United Kingdom//ˌkæn.təˈniːz//
  • Canada//ˌkæn.təˈniz//
  • Canada/[ˌkɛən.təˈniz]/
  • Australia//ˌkæn.təˈniːz//
  • Australia/[ˌkeːn.təˈniz]/

Relating to the city of Guangzhou (Canton) or the province of Guangdong.

adjective

  1. 1

    Relating to the city of Guangzhou (Canton) or the province of Guangdong.

  2. 2

    Relating to Cantonese people.

  3. 3

    Relating to Cantonese language.

  4. 4

    Relating to Cantonese food/cuisine.

Etymology

Etymology tree English Canton Proto-Indo-European *-iskos Proto-Germanic *-iskaz Proto-West Germanic *-iskbor. Late Latin -iscus ▲ Vulgar Latin -iscus Latin -ēnsis Old French -eisbor. Middle English -eys English -ese English Cantonese From Canton + -ese.

noun

  1. 1

    A Sinitic language mainly spoken in the south-eastern part of Mainland China, Guangdong (Canton), Hong Kong, Macau, by the Chinese minorities in Southeast Asia and by many overseas Chinese worldwide.

    As a mainland China national, the counter for our trial was fluent in English, Putonghua, and the Sichuan dialect, and was familiar with a number of other major Chinese languages such as Cantonese and Hakka.

    Each written word when spoken is mutually incomprehensible between a Mandarin speaker in Beijing and a Cantonese speaker in Hong Kong. If you think that’s odd, consider our number system: the symbol “9” is universally recognized but it’s pronounced “nine” in English and “devet” in Slovenian.

  2. 2

    A dialect of the Yue language, spoken in Guangzhou (Canton), Hong Kong, Macau, and treated as the standard dialect of the Yue language.

  3. 3

    An inhabitant of Canton; a person of Canton descent.

    The alliance was headed by a mustached Cantonese with a broad face, piercing eyes, and a great sympathy for the poor and downtrodden, a man who reveled in "action at all costs and whatever the risks." This was Sun Yat-sen, a visionary who lacked practical political skills but nonetheless became the hallowed "Father of the Republic" upon his death.

The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).