araba

plural arabas · alternative arba · alternative aroba

1. historicalA horse-drawn carriage once used for transportation in pre-modern Turkey.

   Whenever I mounted the araba, he would whip his horses to a sharp trot or canter for half a mile, and then at a word stop for me to get out.

   1917, W.J. Childs, Across Asia Minor on Foot

   3 more examples

   No one but a native of the luxurious East could ever have invented an araba, with its comfortable cushions, and its gaily painted roof, and gilded pillars. The prettiest are those of brown and gold, with rose-coloured draperies, through which the breeze flutters to your cheek as blandly as though it loved the tint that reminded it of the roses of the past season amid which it had wandered."

   1836, Julia Pardoe, City of the Sultan; and Domestic Manners of the Turks

   I found the examination of these antiquities much less pleasant than to look at the many troops of children assembled on the plain to play; and to watch them as they were dragged about in little queer arobas, or painted carriages, which are there kept for hire.

   1845, William Makepeace Thackeray, Notes on a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo

   There is, however, such a thing as an “araba,” a vehicle drawn by oxen, in which the wives of a rich man are sometimes dragged four or five miles over the grass by way of recreation. The carriage is rudely framed, but you recognise in the simple grandeur of its design a likeness to things majestic; in short, if your carpenter’s son were to make a “Lord Mayor’s coach” for little Amy, he would build a carriage very much in the style of a Turkish araba.

   1898, Alexander William Kinglake, Eothen

1. The Kingdom of Hatra, a 2nd-century Arab kingdom located between the Roman Empire and the Parthian Empire, mostly under Parthian suzerainty, in modern-day northern Iraq.