East Indies
Americanplural noun
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Also called the Indies. SE Asia, including East Timor, India, Indonesia, and the Malay Archipelago.
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the Malay Archipelago.
plural noun
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the Malay Archipelago, including or excluding the Philippines
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SE Asia in general
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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.
The great stories of exploration and trade and imperial rivalry are here, from the Phoenician sailors who plied the ancient Mediterranean to the 17th-century Dutch who traded in the East Indies.
From The Wall Street Journal • Mar. 17, 2026
The Dutch in the East Indies and the British in India saw relationships between European women and colonised men as much more threatening than the reverse, and policed them accordingly.
From BBC • Dec. 25, 2023
Japanese troops occupied Indonesia, then the Dutch East Indies colony, from 1942 until Tokyo surrendered in August 1945.
From Seattle Times • Jun. 18, 2023
Jacob Luitjens was born April 18, 1919, in Buitenzorg, in what was then the Dutch East Indies, now Bogor on the Indonesian island of Java.
From Washington Post • Dec. 20, 2022
To work the colonists’ farms, slaves were soon imported from different corners of the Dutch empire, from West Africa, Madagascar, and the East Indies.
From "Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood" by Trevor Noah
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.
