giaour
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English[edit]
Etymology[edit]
From Ottoman Turkish كاور (gâvur), from Persian گاور (gâvor), a variant of گبر (gabr, “infidel”); see there for more. Doublet of Gheber and Gueber.
Pronunciation[edit]
Noun[edit]
giaour (plural giaours)
- (religious slur) A non-Muslim, especially a Christian, an infidel; especially as used by Turkish people with particular reference to Christians such as Greeks, Armenians, Bulgarians, Serbs and Assyrians.
- 1963, Thomas Pynchon, V.:
- We men are not a race of freebooters or giaours; not when our argosies are prey and food to the evil fish-of-metal whose lair is a German U-boat.
- 2001, Orhan Pamuk, translated by Erdağ M. Göknar, My Name Is Red:
- I shudder in delight when I think of two-hundred-year-old books, dating back to the time of Tamerlane, volumes for which acquisitive giaours gleefully relinquish gold pieces and which they carry all the way back to their own countries […] .
- 2004, Ebenezer Cobham Brewer, “The Giaour”, in Character Sketches Of Romance, Fiction And The Drama, volume 2, page 85:
- Byron’s tale called The Giaour is supposed to be told by a Turkish fisherman who had been employed all the day in the gulf of Ægi’na, and landed his boat at night-fall on the Piræus, now called the harbor of Port Leonê. […] The tale is this: Leilah, the beautiful concubine of the Caliph Hasson[sic], falls in love with a giaour, flees from the seraglio, is overtaken by an emir, put to death, and cast into the sea. The giaour cleaves Hassan’s skull, flees for his life, and becomes a monk.
Translations[edit]
infidel
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References[edit]
- “‖Giaour” on page 172 of § 2 (G) of volume IV (F and G, ed. Henry Bradley, 1901) of A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles (1st ed.)
Further reading[edit]
French[edit]
Noun[edit]
giaour m (plural giaours)
Further reading[edit]
- “giaour”, in Trésor de la langue française informatisé [Digitized Treasury of the French Language], 2012.
Portuguese[edit]
Noun[edit]
giaour m (plural giaours)
Categories:
- English terms borrowed from Ottoman Turkish
- English terms derived from Ottoman Turkish
- English terms derived from Persian
- English doublets
- English 2-syllable words
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- English lemmas
- English nouns
- English countable nouns
- English religious slurs
- English terms with quotations
- French lemmas
- French nouns
- French countable nouns
- French masculine nouns
- French religious slurs
- Portuguese lemmas
- Portuguese nouns
- Portuguese countable nouns
- Portuguese masculine nouns
- Portuguese religious slurs