giaour

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

• IPA^(key): /ˈdʒaʊə/

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.

• “‖Giaour” on page 172 of § 2 (G) of volume IV (F and G, ed. Henry Bradley, 1901) of A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles (1st ed.)

• giaour on Wikipedia.Wikipedia

giaour m (plural giaours)

1. (ethnic slur) giaour (term for a non-Muslim used by Turks)