Etymology

mehtar

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Today it means: A ruler in certain princely states of the Northwest Frontier region. Full definition →

Persian مهتر
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The story

  1. Persian · borrowed fromمهتر“prince, chief, elder, great personage”
  2. English todaymehtar

From Persian مهتر (“prince, chief, elder, great personage”). Regarding the sense of a scavenger, Yule & Burnell (see References) state that the term was "applied to the class in question in irony, or rather in consolation".

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.