giaour
Definition from Wiktionary, the free dictionary
Contents |
English[edit]
Etymology[edit]
From Turkish gavur, from Persian گور (gaur, “pagan, infidel”), a variant of گبر (gabr), probably from Arabic كافر (kāfir, “unbeliever”).
Pronunciation[edit]
- IPA: /ˈdʒaʊə/
Noun[edit]
giaour (plural giaours)
- (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, entry 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.
- 1963, Thomas Pynchon, V.,
