# Pakistan

Pronunciation: say "pah-ki-STAHN" /ˌpɑːkɪˈstɑːn/

## Proper noun

1. A country in South Asia, officially the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, with its capital at Islamabad.
   - Simple: A country in South Asia. Its capital city is Islamabad.
   - _Pakistan gained independence from British rule in 1947._
   - _The Indus River flows through Pakistan on its way to the Arabian Sea._

## Origin

Borrowed from Urdu پاکستان (pākistān, "Land of the Holy"), from پاک (pāk, "pure, holy, undefiled") and the Classical Persian suffix -stān. The word was coined in 1933 by Pakistani politician Chuhdary Rahmat Ali, who published it in his pamphlet Now or Never as an acronym of the "Muslim homelands" of western India: Punjab, Afghania, Kashmir, Sindh, and Balochistan; the letter ⟨i⟩ is not part of that acronym but is epenthetic.

Source: DictionaryAI, https://dictionaryai.com/define/pakistan (written from Wiktionary data, CC BY-SA 4.0: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/).