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southern

adjectivenouncommon in dialogue

  • United Kingdom//ˈsʌðən//
  • Canada//ˈsʌðɚn//
  • //ˈsaʊðɚn//
  • //ˈsaʊ.təɹn//

Of, facing, situated in, or related to the south.

adjective

  1. 1

    Of, facing, situated in, or related to the south.

  2. 2

    Of or pertaining to a southern region, especially Southern Europe or the southern United States.

    The southern climate.

    From the ground, Colombo’s port does not look like much.[…] But viewed from high up in one of the growing number of skyscrapers in Sri Lanka’s capital, it is clear that something extraordinary is happening: China is creating a shipping hub just 200 miles from India’s southern tip.

    A group of Thai researchers found the spider during an expedition to Phang-Nga province in southern Thailand to research the diversity and distribution of tarantulas in the country.

  3. 3

    Of a wind: blowing from the south; southerly.

Etymology

From Middle English southerne, sothern, sutherne, from Old English sūþerne (“southern, southerly, coming from the south; of southern make”), from Proto-Germanic *sunþrōnijaz (“southern”), from Proto-Indo-European *sh₂un-, *sh₂wen-, r/n-stem alternation of *sóh₂wl̥ (“sun”). Cognate with Scots southron, sudron (“southern”), Old Frisian sūthern, sūdern (“southern”), Middle Low German sūdern (“southern”), Middle High German sundern (“southern”), Icelandic suðrænn (“southern, tropical”). By surface analysis, south + -ern.

noun

  1. 1

    Synonym of southerner.

    Force prevails most with the northerns, reason with the inhabitants of a temperate or middle climate, superstition with the southerns; thus astrology, magic, and all mysterious sciences have come from the Chaldeans and Egyptians.

    The peace which the French leaguers made soon after with Louis XL, for money and offices, did not satisfy the southerns, whose views in this patriotic war had been wholly different.

    This last formed a strong contrast, by its simplicity and its austere bearing, with the old army of Italy, enriched in the beautiful plains which it had conquered, and composed of brave, fiery, and intemperate Southerns.

    Then in 1835 it (negatively) remarked 'a national tone and feeling [. . .] with which we southerns do not wholly sympathize'.

Forms

plural
southerns
comparative
more southern
superlative
most southern, southernmost
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).