Indonesian
Americannoun
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a member of the ethnic group consisting of the natives of Indonesia, the Filipinos, and the Malays of Malaysia.
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a member of a population supposed to have been resident in the Malay Archipelago before the Malays, and believed to constitute one element of the present mixed population of Malaysia and perhaps Polynesia.
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Official Name Bahasa Indonesia. an Indonesian language that is based on the form of Malay spoken in Java and has the status of official language in the Republic of Indonesia.
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the westernmost branch of the Austronesian family of languages, including Malay, Indonesian, Tagalog, and Malagasy.
adjective
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of or relating to the Malay Archipelago.
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of or relating to Indonesia, the Indonesians, or their languages.
adjective
noun
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a native or inhabitant of Indonesia
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another name for Bahasa Indonesia
Other Word Forms
Derived Forms
Inflected Forms
Nouns
Etymology
Origin of Indonesian
First recorded in 1840–50; Indonesi(a) + -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.
Some of the SpaceX investors on Kahlon’s ledger are easy to identify: the Indian politician Abhishek Singhvi; Betsy DeVos, the former U.S. secretary of education; a British Virgin Islands company owned by Indonesian billionaires.
From Salon • Jun. 19, 2026
The house’s roster has included an Indonesian theologian, a singer at a trade opera center, and a Japanese U.N. translator the house helped join a dating app.
From The Wall Street Journal • Jun. 11, 2026
Or perhaps the vagueness stems from casting a mish-mash of Thai, Indonesian, Vietnamese, Chinese and American actors.
From Los Angeles Times • Jun. 11, 2026
Four days of extreme rain and landslides in the Indonesian island of Sumatra have pushed the world's most endangered great apes even closer to extinction, says a study.
From BBC • Jun. 11, 2026
Yet counting all species together, there were still no more than perhaps a million humans living between the Indonesian archipelago and the Iberian peninsula, a mere blip on the ecological radar.
From "Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind" by Yuval Noah Harari
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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.