giaour

English

Etymology

From Ottoman Turkish كاور (gāvur) (Turkish gâvur), from Persian گاور (gâvor), a variant of گبر (gabr, infidel); see there for more.

Pronunciation

  • IPA(key): /ˈdʒaʊə/

Noun

giaour (plural giaours)

  1. (derogatory, ethnic 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, Erdağ M. Göknar (translator), 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

References

Further reading


Portuguese

Noun

giaour m (plural giaours)

  1. (ethnic slur) giaour (term for a non-Muslim used by Turks)
This article is issued from Wiktionary. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.