9. Coffee: There’s an awful lot of coffee in Brazil, but there didn’t use to be. Coffee plantations weren’t established in Brazil until 1727. England was already mad for coffee in the seventeenth century. In 1675 over 3,000 coffee houses were plying their trade. Coffee had appeared in Europe over a century before then, from Arabia. Yemen was the first great coffee exporter and it was such a lucrative trade that the government banned the export of any coffee plants for any purpose. Nevertheless a Muslim pilgrim managed to smuggle some coffee beans out and raised coffee crops in India, and it spread from there. The Arabic word for coffee is qahwah, which probably derives from the Kaffa region of Ethiopia, which is the original home of the plant.
10. Garble: There are a host of Arabic derived words I’ve not been able to cover, including adobe, apricot, candy, cork, cotton, gazelle, ghoul, giraffe, jar, lime, mask, mattress, mohair, orange, safari, sofa, spinach, syrup and zero. Everyone of these words has Arabic roots but I’ve limited myself to 10, so none of them make the list. My final word is garble, which distinguished itself by having lost its original Arabic meaning. To garble means to corrupt, falsify, distort or scramble. In shipping, garbling is the practice of mixing rubbish with genuine cargo. However the original Arabic word, gharbala, means to sift – sifting being a process used in refining and selecting spices. The meaning was lost in translation, with the original meaning being thoroughly garbled.
Also:
10 Curse Words You Don’t Know
10 Insulting Words You Don’t Know
10 Nonsense Words You Don’t Know
10 Words You Don’t Know With Limericks
10 Units of Measure You Don’t Know
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~ Albert Einstein
