Berber

American  

[bur-ber] / ˈbɜr bər /

noun

• Berbers
  plural

1. a member of a group of North African tribes living in Barbary and the Sahara.

2. a subfamily of Afro-Asiatic, consisting of the languages of the Berbers, including Tuareg and Kabyle.

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adjective

1. of or relating to the Berbers or their language.

Berber British  

/ ˈbɜːbə /

noun

1. a member of a Caucasoid Muslim people of N Africa

2. the language of this people, forming a subfamily of the Afro-Asiatic family of languages. There are extensive differences between dialects

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adjective

1. of or relating to this people or their language

Other Word Forms

Noun Inflected Forms

• Berbers
  plural

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Etymology

Origin of Berber

1835–45; < Arabic barbar < Greek bárbaros; see barbarous

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Example Sentences

See Examples For:

Berber Berbers

Maxwell Zeff, Keach Hagey and Berber Jin report on the clash over AI’s secrets and safety.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Oct. 23, 2026

Until he publicly resigned from Anthropic and warned about the dangers of AI systems that could end humanity, Jacob Coxon was anonymous, report Amrith Ramkumar, Erin Woo, Berber Jin and Ben Cohen.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Sep. 17, 2026

According to Berber, Natixis’s chief economist, commodity-producing countries with improving market fundamentals, such as Brazil and Mexico, are most likely to weather the war-related volatility well.

From Barron's ● Mar. 9, 2026

Prof Philomena Mwaura, an academic at Kenya's Kenyatta University, told the BBC that Roman Africa was very multicultural, with local Berber and Punic groups, freed slaves and people who had come from Rome found there.

From BBC ● Apr. 28, 2025

They were stopped at the gates by gargantuan Berber guards with scimitars and chased away.

From "Catch-22" by Joseph Heller

Morocco has a substantial population of Berbers, or Amazigh as they prefer to be called - some estimates put it at nearly 40% of the country's population of more than 34 million.

From BBC ● Dec. 20, 2022

President Abdelmadjid Tebboune tweeted that the soldiers saved 100 citizens from the blazes in two areas in the mountainous Kabylie region, home of the Berbers.

From Washington Post ● Aug. 10, 2021

Interior Minister Kamel Beldjoud traveled to Kabyle, home of Berbers, to assess the situation.

From Seattle Times ● Aug. 10, 2021

Ms. Elkayam said she wept the first time she heard the aching, mesmerizing voices of those long-ago Amazighs — often called Berbers, a term some consider derogatory.

From New York Times ● Mar. 26, 2021

The Christian reconquest.—In the eighth century the Mohammedan Berbers had overthrown the Visigothic kingdom, the unconquered Christian princes retiring to the mountain regions of the north.

From The Colonization of North America 1492-1783 by Herbert Eugene Bolton

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