gòn
Vietnamese edit
Etymology edit
Unclear. The word is not Sino-Vietnamese and ⟨g/gh⟩ is also not a possible initial in Sino-Vietnamese proper, therefore the word might be either native, a vernacular Sinitic loan (either from a regional Sinitic language or is an early, pre-Middle Chinese loan), or a loan from another neighboring language. The Nôm character 棍, as with many other cases, is merely a character formed by phono-semantic matching.
The word might (but unlikely) be the second element in the placename Sài Gòn.