Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun A domestic cat of a large breed developed in France from a Burmese breed, having a long cream-colored coat with dark ears, face, tail, and legs, white paws, and blue eyes.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun A medium size semi-longhair domestic cat breed originating in Burma.

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[French birman, Burman, from earlier Birman, Burma.]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

French Birman.

Support

Help support Wordnik (and make this page ad-free) by adopting the word Birman.

Examples

  • Birman stuck to his views and drew further scorn later that decade by predicting that Mikhail Gorbachev would lack the will to make the far-reaching economic reforms that were the only way to save the Soviet political system.

    Right From the Start 2011

  • For this apostasy, these Western elites ostracized and criticized Birman, saying that his views were by definition biased because he was an emigre.

    Right From the Start 2011

  • An occasional contributor to this newspaper, Birman was especially critical of the CIA and most Western experts for trusting too much in Moscow's official claims.

    Right From the Start 2011

  • Perhaps because he had served as a director of planning in Soviet factories, Birman had a profound distrust of Soviet statistics and believed its economy was smaller and could support far less nonmilitary consumption than nearly all Sovietologists in the West believed at the time.

    Right From the Start 2011

  • Birman, who died on April 6 at age 82, was a Russian economist who emigrated to the U.S. in 1974 and predicted the collapse of the Soviet economy.

    Right From the Start 2011

  • Birman's insight that the Soviet Union was far weaker than it seemed from its military prowess was implicitly adopted by Ronald Reagan when he famously predicted in 1982 that "freedom and democracy will leave Marxism and Leninism on the ash heap of history."

    Right From the Start 2011

  • Two men who were right about the Cold War and the great debates of the 20th century—William Rusher and Igor Birman—recently died and deserve more notice than they've received.

    Right From the Start 2011

  • In a 2003 essay, "The Failure of the American Sovietological Economics Profession," John Howard Wilhelm recounted the debate between Birman and the CIA, concluding that "Given what has happened and what we now know, Birman clearly did get it right."

    Right From the Start 2011

  • That dismissal was unfair to Birman's scholarship, but it also had profound implications for U.S. policy during the last decades of the Cold War.

    Right From the Start 2011

  • Bill Rusher and Igor Birman dared to challenge the liberal establishment.

    Right From the Start 2011

Comments

Log in or sign up to get involved in the conversation. It's quick and easy.

  • The Birman is a domestic cat breed. Also known as "Sacred Cat of Burma", it is not to be confused with the Burmese (cat), which is a separate and dissimilar breed. The Birman has a pale coloured body and darker points with deep blue eyes.

    June 29, 2009