Meaning & use
Orientalist
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A scholar, artist, or writer who studies or depicts the languages, cultures, and history of Asia and the Middle East, often from a historically Western viewpoint.
See it in a sentence
The museum's collection of Orientalist paintings sparked debate about how the East was portrayed by 19th-century Europeans.
As a young orientalist, he spent years learning Persian and Ottoman Turkish.
A note on using this word
The term gained a critical, often negative connotation after Edward Said's 1978 book 'Orientalism', which argued such scholarship frequently reflected colonial bias.
Words with a similar meaning
Asian-studies scholar
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