Phoenician
Americannoun
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Phoenicians
plural
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a native or inhabitant of Phoenicia.
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the extinct Semitic language of the Phoenicians.
adjective
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of or relating to Phoenicia, its people, or their language.
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noting or pertaining to the script used for the writing of Phoenician from the 11th century b.c. or earlier and from which were derived the Greek, Roman, and all other Western alphabets.
noun
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a member of an ancient Semitic people of NW Syria who dominated the trade of the ancient world in the first millennium bc and founded colonies throughout the Mediterranean
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the extinct language of this people, belonging to the Canaanitic branch of the Semitic subfamily of the Afro-Asiatic family
adjective
Other Word Forms
Noun Inflected Forms
Etymology
Origin of Phoenician
Middle English word dating back to 1350–1400; see origin at Phoenicia, -an
Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
See Examples For:
On another nearby property overlooking an ancient sea wall, excavations revealed two stone quarries "one Roman and the other Phoenician", she said.
From Barron's ● Aug. 29, 2026
The painting portrays a moment in an ancient Cretan myth recounted in Ovid’s “Metamorphoses”: Zeus descends to Earth, transforms himself into a white bull and lolls among the herds belonging to the Phoenician king.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Aug. 21, 2026
The Al-Bass site is centred on a necropolis that dates back three millennia to Tyre's time as a major Phoenician city and was still in use until the Arab conquests of the 7h Century.
From Barron's ● Mar. 24, 2026
A couple of weeks ago, while out for drinks with a friend, I casually mentioned that I was looking forward to seeing the new Wes Anderson movie, “The Phoenician Scheme.”
From Salon ● May 22, 2025
The writing was no longer an ambiguous syllabary mixed with logograms but an alphabet borrowed from the Phoenician consonantal alphabet and improved by the Greek invention of vowels.
From "Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies" by Jared M. Diamond
In antiquity, the Phoenicians brought techniques for making a light-bodied wine to Marseilles.
From Salon ● Jul. 15, 2024
Cline suggests there are lessons in the resilience of the Phoenicians about having decentralized and redundant systems and being innovative and self-sufficient—qualities that could help societies endure systemic shocks today.
From Slate ● Apr. 28, 2024
The common name of the dyestuff, Tyrian purple, derives from the habitat of the mollusks, which the Phoenicians purportedly began harvesting in the 16th century B.C. in the city-state of Tyre in present-day Lebanon.
From New York Times ● Mar. 5, 2024
The fishing industry employees 2,000 people in Tyre, a centre of ancient civilisation from where the Phoenicians sailed all over the Mediterranean.
From Reuters ● Oct. 29, 2023
Enthusiasts proposed a dozen groups as the ancestral stock: Phoenicians, Basques, Chinese, Scythians, Romans, Africans, “Hindoos,” ancient Greeks, ancient Assyrians, ancient Egyptians, the inhabitants of Atlantis, even straying bands of Welsh.
From "1491" by Charles C. Mann
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
