datu

American  

[dah-too] / ˈdɑ tu /

noun

datus plural

1. (in the Philippines) a Native chief.

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Other Word Forms

Inflected Forms

noun

• datus
  plural
• datu
  plural

Etymology

Origin of datu

First recorded in 1925–30; from Tagalog datu, dato “landowner, head of a clan or tribe”; akin to dato ( def. )

Example Sentences

Six people were missing in Datu Blah Sinsuat and 10 others in Upi, Sinarimbo said.

From Washington Times • Oct. 28, 2022

Five people were missing in Datu Blah Sinsuat, according to the town’s mayor, Marshall Sinsuat.

From Seattle Times • Oct. 27, 2022

The ReCAAP report details an incident off the coast of Lahad Datu, Malaysia, in January.

From BBC • Jul. 17, 2020

Then, Datu Ali, a rebel leader, became the subject of a two-year manhunt — not unlike the ones that finally killed al-Qaeda’s Osama bin Laden and ISIS’s Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.

From Salon • Dec. 24, 2019

All the accounts of the Datu of Soung are kept in Dutch, by a young Malay from Ternate, who writes a good hand, and speaks English, and whom we found exceedingly useful to us.

From The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 Explorations by early navigators, descriptions of the islands and their peoples, their history and records of the catholic missions, as related in contemporaneous books and manuscripts, showing the political, economic, commercial and religious conditions of those islands from their earliest relations with European nations to the close of the nineteenth century, Volume XLIII, 1670-1700 by Various