coffle

English

WOTD – 6 August 2011

Alternative forms

• kaffle

Etymology

From Arabic قَافِلَة (qāfila, “caravan”). Doublet of cafila.

Pronunciation

• (Received Pronunciation) IPA^(key): /ˈkɒfl̩/
• (US) IPA^(key): /ˈkɔfl̩/
• (US, cot–caught merger, Canada) IPA^(key): /ˈkɑfl̩/

• Audio (AU)

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• Audio (US)

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Noun

coffle (plural coffles)

1. A line of people or animals fastened together, especially a chain of prisoners or slaves.
   • 1816, Mungo Park, Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa:

     The people of the coffle spent the day in drying such articles as were wet, and in cleaning ten pairs of ornamented pistols with shea-butter.

   • 1892, Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself”, in Leaves of Grass […], Philadelphia, Pa.: David McKay, publisher, […], →OCLC:

     I hear the wheeze of the slave-coffle, as the slaves march on, as the husky gangs pass on by twos and threes, fastened together with wrist-chains and ankle-chains,

   • 1982, TC Boyle, Water Music, Penguin, published 2006, page 173:

     If the explorer could make Kamalia he might be able to hook up with a slave coffle heading for the coast.

   • 1997 [1990], David Foster Wallace, “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction”, in A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments, Boston, Mass.: Little, Brown and Company, →ISBN:

     Once all experience is finally reduced to marketable image, once the receiving user of user-friendly receivers can break from the coffle and choose freely, Americanly, from an Americanly infinite variety of moving images hardly distinguishable from real-life images […]

   • 2000, George R.R. Martin, A Storm of Swords, Bantam, published 2011, page 323:

     Her litter came to a sudden halt at the cross street, to allow a coffle of slaves to shuffle across her path, urged along by the crack of an overseer's lash.

   • 2011 February 18, Susan Eva O'Donovan, “William Webb's World”, in New York Times‎^[1]:

     It dominated late-night dinner conversation; it traveled along with marching columns of chained slaves, the infamous coffle lines that remain the iconic face of the domestic slave trade.

Translations

a line of people or animals fastened together

• Russian: верени́ца (ru) f (vereníca), карава́н (ru) m (karaván), цепо́чка (ru) f (cepóčka)
• Spanish: cáfila (es) f

Verb

coffle (third-person singular simple present coffles, present participle coffling, simple past and past participle coffled)

1. (transitive) To fasten (a line of people or animals) together.

Anagrams

• Coffel