Advertisement
504 entries found
kaffeeklatsch (n.)

"gossip over cups of coffee," 1877, from German Kaffeeklatsch, from kaffee "coffee" (see coffee) + klatsch "gossip" (see klatsch).

THE living-room in a German household always contains a large sofa at one side of the room, which is the seat of honor accorded a guest. At a Kaffeeklatsch (literally, coffee gossip) the guests of honor are seated on this sofa, and the large round table is wheeled up before them. The other guests seat themselves in chairs about the table. [Mary Alden Hopkins, "A 'Kaffeeklatsch,'" "Boston Cooking-School Magazine of Culinary Science and Domestic Economics," May 1905]
Related entries & more 
Advertisement
Kaffir (n.)
1790, "infidel," earlier and also caffre (1670s), from Arabic kafir "unbeliever, infidel, impious wretch," with a literal sense of "one who does not admit (the blessings of God)," from kafara "to cover up, conceal, deny, blot out."

Technically, "a non-Muslim," but in Ottoman times it came to be used there almost exclusively as the disparaging word for "Christian." It also was used by Muslims in East Africa of the pagan black Africans; English missionaries then picked it up as an equivalent of "heathen" to refer to Bantus in South Africa (1731), from which use in English it came generally to mean "South African black" regardless of ethnicity, and to be a term of abuse at least since 1934.
Related entries & more 
kaffiyeh (n.)
also keffieh, keffiyeh, small shawl or scarf worn with a cord around the head by some Arab men, 1817.
Related entries & more 
Kafkaesque (adj.)
1947, resembling such situations as are explored in the fiction of Franz Kafka (1883-1924), German-speaking Jewish novelist born in Prague, Austria-Hungary. The surname is Czech German, literally "jackdaw," and is imitative.
Related entries & more 
Advertisement
Kahlua 
Mexican coffee-flavored liqueur, produced from 1936, the name said to be from the native Acolhua people, allies of the Aztecs.
Related entries & more 
kahuna (n.)
1886, in a report in English by the Hawaiian government, which defines the word as "doctor and sorcerer," from Hawaiian, where it was applied as well to priests and navigators. In surfer slang, "a god of surfing," it is attested from 1962 (but big kahuna in same sense is said to date from 1950s).
Related entries & more 
kaiser (n.)
1858 in reference to the emperors of Austria and (after 1870) Germany, from German Kaiser, Bavarian and Austrian spelling variant of of Middle High German keisar, from Old High German keisar "emperor," an early borrowing of Latin cognomen Caesar.

The Germanic peoples seem to have called all Roman emperors "caesar" (compare Old English casere, Old Norse keisari "an emperor"). The word also entered Germanic via Gothic, perhaps from Greek. According to Kluge, one of the earliest Latin loan word in Germanic. The Old English word fell from use after Middle English.
Related entries & more 
kakistocracy (n.)
"government by the worst element of a society," 1829, coined (by Thomas Love Peacock) on analogy of its opposite, aristocracy, from Greek kakistos "worst," superlative of kakos "bad" (which perhaps is related to PIE root *kakka- "to defecate") + -cracy. Perhaps the closest word in ancient Greek was kakonomia "a bad system of laws and government," hence kakonomos "with bad laws, ill-governed."
Related entries & more 
Kalashnikov (n.)
type of rifle or submachine gun, 1968, from Russian Kalashnikov, name of a weapon developed in the Soviet Union c. 1946 and named for Mikhail Kalashnikov, gun designer and part of the team that built it. In AK-47, the AK stands for Avtomat Kalashnikov.
Related entries & more 

Page 3