Friday, September 28, 2007

Hobson Jobson

This is fun. Hobson-Jobson, the early 20th century dictionary of Indian-English, is available online. Of course it is.

And here's godown (warehouse). Don and I were just wondering yesterday if it's from "going down", if it's literally taken from an Indian language, or what. Seems as if its actually just the anglicized version of a longstanding Telugu/Tamil/South Indian word for a "place where goods are."

And what's a Hobson-Jobson anyway? Click here.

1 comment:

  1. I saw here that it comes from Dravidian origin. The "going down" angle is a nice approach though :)


    http://www.answers.com/topic/godown

    ReplyDelete