Sindh

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. A province in southeastern Pakistan whose largest city is Karachi and whose fertile Indus River plain has long supported agriculture
2. The southeastern Pakistani province that contains Karachi, the country's largest city, and lies along the lower course of the Indus River
3. A region of southeastern Pakistan bordering the Arabian Sea, historically a center of Indus Valley civilization and now a major province

Etymology: The name "Sindh," today a province of southeastern Pakistan, is the same word as "Indus," the great river that flows through it. Both descend from a Sanskrit term, "sindhu," meaning simply "river" or "a large body of water." Over millennia, that ordinary noun became the name of the river itself and then of the land along its banks, so the region was named for water before it was named for anything else. English took the name indirectly. It was borrowed from Urdu, where the form "sindh" is the local rendering of the Sanskrit word, and it arrived in English as the name of the province. Because "Indus" comes from the same Sanskrit source through Greek and Latin, the two English words are doublets: separate routes from one root that ended up as distinct forms in the language.