Data source: Gina A. Zurlo, ed., World Religion Database (Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2024).
| Glossary item | Definition |
|---|---|
| Vishnavites | Vaishnavites (qv). |
| Wahhabites | Sunni Muslims reform movement of the most rigid school of law, Hanabila. |
| waqf, wakf | (Arabic; plural, awkaf). A Muslim religious or charitable foundation created by an endowed trust fund. |
| Weighting | Any adjustments made to the data to match the general demographic characteristics of the overall country. |
| world religion | A worldwide universal religion with from 1 million to 10 million adherents. |
| world religions | The major religions of the world defined here as those with (in AD 2000) over 2% each of the world’s population, as follows: Christianity (33.0%), Islam (19.6%), Hinduism (13.4%), Buddhism (5.9%), Chinese folk religion (6.4%), excluding (because local not universal) primal or tribal religion (3.8%), but including Asiatic New Religions (1.7%); also atheism (2.5%) and agnosticism (12.7%) regarded as worldwide quasi-religions. |
| World Wide Web | A hypermedia-based system for browsing Internet sites, housing millions of home pages, including most Christian organizations. |
| Yellow Hat | (Reformed). Lamaism, or Yellow Church (in Tibetan, Dge-lugs-pa or Gelukpa, ‘Model of Virtue’). That part of Tibetan Buddhism in which monasteries and monks have accepted the 14th-century reforms of the monk Tsong-Khapa. Its executive head is the Dalai Lama; The Panchen Lama also comes from this grouping. |
| Yezidis | Yazidis. Members of a 12th-century syncretistic religious sect in Iraq; now mainly in Turkey, Iraq and Kazakhstan and classified here as Neoreligionists. |
| Zaydis | (Zaidis). A Muslim sect in Yemen that constitutes one of the 4 major branches of Shia Islam recognizes a continuing line of imams descended through Zaid (the 5th imam), and is closest to sunna in its doctrine. |
| zone | In linguistic classification, a glossozone (qv), numbering 100 across the world. |
| Zoroastrians | Followers of a religion founded in Persia in 1200 BCE by the prophet Zoroaster, teaching the worship of Ahura Mazda; mainly in India (where they are known as Parsis) and Iran. |
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