cafard

From French cafard.

cafard (plural cafards)

1. Depression; melancholy.
   • 1918, Elizabeth Frazer, Old glory and Verdun (page 169)
   • That's the worst trouble with the soldiers in the trenches — nothing to do. It gives them the cafards, the black butterflies, the blue devils, the jimjams, the hump.
   • 1957, Lawrence Durrell, Justine:

     At such times when the cafard of the city seized her, I was at my wits' end to devise a means of rousing her.

Francized form of Arabic كافِر‎ (kāfir, “unbeliever”).

• IPA^(key): /ka.faʁ/

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• Rhymes: -aʁ

cafard m (plural cafards, feminine cafarde)

1. hypocrite

   Synonyms: bigot, hypocrite

2. (by extension) tattletale, informant, rat
3. (entomology) cockroach

   Synonyms: blatte, cancrelat, coquerelle (Quebec)

4. (familiar) depression, melancholy

   Synonyms: mélancolie, spleen

• avoir le cafard

• “cafard” in le Trésor de la langue française informatisé (The Digitized Treasury of the French Language).