Pronounced: KOM-plot, noun; kuhm-PLOT, verb
Notes: You might be able to guess this word, but I’ve not heard of it
Yesterday’s word
The word casbah means
- a North African castle or fortress
- the native section of a North African city
First usage
Our word came into English in the mid-1700s
Background / Comments
Our word can be capitalized (Casbah) and may also be spelled kasbah/Kasbah. I know of a phrase: Come with me to the Casbah, but I don’t know anything about it — I’ve just heard it somewhere… and associated with comedy in my mind. In doing research on our word, it is thought that the phrase comes from the movie Algiers, which came out in 1938 and starred Charles Boyer. Although he did not say it in the film, I learned that his character in the film was the inspiration for the Looney Tunes character Pepé Le Pew, and and that character did use the phrase Come with me to the Casbah, so that is where I remembered it from. Our word comes from an Arabic dialect word qasbah (fortress).
Richard's Vocabulary Word-of-the-Day 