coffle
English
editAlternative forms
editEtymology
editFrom Arabic قَافِلَة (qāfila, “caravan”). Doublet of cafila.
Pronunciation
edit- (Received Pronunciation) IPA(key): /ˈkɒfl̩/
- (US) IPA(key): /ˈkɔfl̩/
- (cot–caught merger) IPA(key): /ˈkɑfl̩/
Audio (General Australian): (file) Audio (US): (file)
Noun
editcoffle (plural coffles)
- A line of people or animals fastened together, especially a chain of prisoners or slaves.
- 1816, Mungo Park, Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa:
- The people of the coffle spent the day in drying such articles as were wet, and in cleaning ten pairs of ornamented pistols with shea-butter.
- 1892, Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself”, in Leaves of Grass […], Philadelphia, Pa.: David McKay, publisher, […], →OCLC:
- I hear the wheeze of the slave-coffle, as the slaves march on, as the husky gangs pass on by twos and threes, fastened together with wrist-chains and ankle-chains,
- 1982, TC Boyle, Water Music, Penguin, published 2006, page 173:
- If the explorer could make Kamalia he might be able to hook up with a slave coffle heading for the coast.
- 1997 [1990], David Foster Wallace, “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction”, in A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments, Boston, Mass.: Little, Brown and Company, →ISBN:
- Once all experience is finally reduced to marketable image, once the receiving user of user-friendly receivers can break from the coffle and choose freely, Americanly, from an Americanly infinite variety of moving images hardly distinguishable from real-life images […]
- 2000, George R.R. Martin, A Storm of Swords, Bantam, published 2011, page 323:
- Her litter came to a sudden halt at the cross street, to allow a coffle of slaves to shuffle across her path, urged along by the crack of an overseer's lash.
- 2011 February 18, Susan Eva O'Donovan, “William Webb's World”, in New York Times[1]:
- It dominated late-night dinner conversation; it traveled along with marching columns of chained slaves, the infamous coffle lines that remain the iconic face of the domestic slave trade.
Translations
edita line of people or animals fastened together
Verb
editcoffle (third-person singular simple present coffles, present participle coffling, simple past and past participle coffled)
- (transitive) To fasten (a line of people or animals) together.
Anagrams
editCategories:
- English terms borrowed from Arabic
- English terms derived from Arabic
- English doublets
- English terms derived from the Arabic root ق ف ل
- English 2-syllable words
- English terms with IPA pronunciation
- English terms with audio links
- English lemmas
- English nouns
- English countable nouns
- English terms with quotations
- English verbs
- English transitive verbs
- en:Slavery