Tidy Lookup
All sites11
Curious Word of the Daycuriouswordoftheday.com

taikonaut

noun /ˈtaɪkəˌnɔːt/

  1. A person who travels in space for the Chinese space program; a Chinese astronaut.

    The past decade has seen remarkable events and changes: […] The Columbia disaster and a Chinese taikonaut in orbit

Where it comes from

From Mandarin 太空 (tàikōng, “space”) + -naut, modelled after astronaut, cosmonaut, spationaut, etc. The term was coined on 19 May 1998 by Chiew Lee Yih (趙里昱 (Zhào Lǐyù)) from Malaysia, who used it first in newsgroups. Almost simultaneously, Chen Lan coined it for use in the Western media.

Adapted from the Wiktionary entry taikonaut (CC BY-SA 4.0).

← tahrirtainture →

Another random word More words starting with T