# shaman

Pronunciation: say "SHAH-muhn" /ˈʃɑːmən/

## Noun

1. In certain traditional societies, a person believed to have access to and influence over the spirit world, who typically enters a trance during rituals and acts as a healer and diviner.
   - Simple: In some traditional cultures, a person believed to talk with spirits and use that power to heal people and foresee things.
   - _The shaman entered a trance to carry the villagers' questions to the spirits._
   - _Anthropologists recorded the songs the shamans sang during each ceremony._

## Origin

English took the word from German Schamane, which came from Russian šamán. The Russian word comes from Evenki şamān or samān, which in turn goes back to Proto-Tungusic *samān. The Evenki word possibly comes from the root şa- (“to know”). Another possibility is borrowing from ṣamāne (“monk”) in Tocharian B or from Chinese shāmén (“Buddhist monk”), traced through Pali samaṇa to Sanskrit śramaṇa (“ascetic, monk, devotee”), itself derived from śrama (“weariness, exhaustion, labor, toil”). Under this explanation, shaman would be a doublet of sramana.

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