one of the three sons of Noah, from Late Latin Japheth, from Greek Iapheth, from Hebrew Yepheth, perhaps literally "enlargement," from causative form of the stem p-t-h "to be wide, spacious."
Entries linking to japheth
Japhetic adj.
in reference to the presumed ancestral language of ancient Greek, Latin, and most of the modern European ones, 1730, from Biblical Japheth, a son of Noah, from whom the European peoples once were popularly supposed to have descended (as Middle Eastern Semitic from Shem; African Hamitic from Ham). Compare Aryan. Related: Japhetian (1752).