western

CEFRB1

/ˈwɛstɚn/

adjective · noun

Türkçe translations

Translating…

In plain English

Examples

Many western customs have taken root in Japan.
Some scholars ascribe the settlement of America to social unrest in Western Europe.

At a glance

Sits at B1 on the CEFR scale

Deep Dive

Extra meaning

Extra meaning

A film, or some other dramatic work, set in, the historic (c. 1850–1910) American West (west of the Mississippi river) focusing on conflict between whites and Indians, lawmen and outlaws, ranchers and farmers, or industry (railroads, mining) and agriculture.

In context

France is in western Europe.
He was not the first Northeastern banker to be surprised by what he saw when he stepped off the train into this Western city.
If I'm going to watch a Western, it needs to be a good one. I had my fill of the bad ones long ago.

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Question 1 · Quick check

Practise this properly in the app, where the word comes back before you forget it.

The word in print, with each source given in full.

Then everybody once more knelt, and soon the blessing was pronounced. The choir and the clergy trooped out slowly, […], down the nave to the western door. […] At a seemingly immense distance the surpliced group stopped to say the last prayer.
1918, W[illiam] B[abington] Maxwell, chapter V, in The Mirror and the Lamp, Indianapolis, Ind.: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, →OCLC
Japanese is traditionally written downwards (tategaki) and you begin reading from the top right of a page. This means that books are opened from what we would consider to be the back. Nowadays, however, books, newspapers and magazines are often written western style, in horizontal lines (yokogaki) from left to right and, in these cases, the book is opened from our (western) understanding of the front.
2008, Helen Gilhooly, chapter 1, in Complete Japanese, →ISBN, page 31

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From Middle English westerne, from Old English westerne, from Proto-Germanic *westrōnijaz. By surface analysis, west + -ern.