Karen
1 Americannoun
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Karens,
plural
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Karen
plural
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a group of people of eastern and southern Myanmar (Burma).
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one of these people.
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the language of the Karen, a Tibeto-Burman language of the Sino-Tibetan family.
adjective
noun
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Also Karin a first name, form of Katherine.
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Informal: Disparaging.
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a white, usually middle-class woman who is rude, demanding, and aggressive toward other people, particularly customer service workers.
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a person acting in an aggressive, entitled, rude way.
He went full Karen on the poor store manager and threatened to get her fired.
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noun
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a member of a Thai people of Myanmar
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the language of this people, probably related to Thai and belonging to the Sino-Tibetan family
Other Word Forms
Noun Inflected Forms
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:
Mayor Karen Bass’ office did not respond to a request for comment.
From Los Angeles Times ● Oct. 2, 2026
“These were easy cases that came up and they were the principals running the business,” said Karen Burke, a tax law professor at the University of Florida.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Oct. 1, 2026
Experience: Winston, a licensed architect and attorney, serves as Los Angeles’ deputy mayor of infrastructure and climate resilience under Mayor Karen Bass.
From Los Angeles Times ● Oct. 1, 2026
UCU branch president Karen Lorimer said staff wanted to be welcoming new and returning students but the refusal to rule out using compulsory redundancies left them with no alternative but to strike.
From BBC ● Sep. 30, 2026
Sighting Karen with her two friends to the right and beneath the scoreboard, Ben waved to them and winked as he retrieved a loose ball.
From "The Great Santini" by Pat Conroy
On one side are so-called trail Karens, who monitor online web cameras and question why the forest service isn’t ticketing “ignorant and selfish” rule breakers who are hiking the mountain anyway.
From Los Angeles Times ● Dec. 18, 2024
I've also had experiences with what we are now calling Karens.
From Salon ● Aug. 11, 2023
“I devoted a lot of lunch hours to that over three years,” said Amanda Boshears, 35, who paid the Karens $50 for the service.
From Washington Post ● Dec. 26, 2022
She was a caricature of a matriarch, but brought complexity and nuance to a type that is usually relegated to sketch comedy, two-dimensional walk-ons or viral videos of monstrous Karens.
From New York Times ● Jan. 23, 2022
But their success has been mostly achieved among a very peculiar hill-tribe of that country,—the Karens.
From India, Its Life and Thought by John P. (John Peter) Jones
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.
