Pencak Silat word "pancha" meaning five, or from the Chinese term "pencha" or "pungcha" which implies parrying or deflecting, and striking or pressing. Other terms may be used in particular dialects such as "silek", "penca", "mancak", "maen po" or "main-po". Dutch East Indian newspapers of the colonial era recorded the terms for martial arts under Dutch spellings. These include "silat", "pencak" (spelled in Dutch as "pentjak"), "penca" ("pentjah"), "mancak" ("mentjak"), "manca" ("mentjah"), and "pukulan" ("poekoelan"). In 1881 a magazine calls mancak a Batak fencing game "with long swords, daggers or wood ("mentjah")" These papers described mancak as Malayan ("Maleidsche") suggesting that the
Silat Melayu Silat Melayu Silat Melayu (Jawi: ), literally meaning "Malay silat", is a blanket term for silat styles of the Malay people. The term was originally used in reference to the native silat of Riau in Indonesia, but today it is more commonly used for the systems created in the Indochinese peninsula, particularly Malaysia, Thailand, Singapore, Brunei and Vietnam. In modern usage, the term is most often used to differentiate the Malaysian styles from Indonesian pencak silat. English-language writings sometimes mistakenly refer to silat Melayu as "bersilat" but this is actually a verb form of the noun silat, literally meaning "to