giaour

plural giaours

1. slurA non-Muslim, especially a Christian, an infidel; especially as used by Turkish people with particular reference to Christians such as Greeks, Armenians, Bulgarians, Serbs and Assyrians.

   And far beyond the Moslem's power / Had wrong'd him with the faithless Giaour.

   1813, Lord Byron, The Giaour, a Fragment of a Turkish Tale, London: John Murray, page 10

   3 more examples

   We men are not a race of freebooters or giaours; not when our argosies are prey and food to the evil fish-of-metal whose lair is a German U-boat.

   1963, Thomas Pynchon, V.

   I shudder in delight when I think of two-hundred-year-old books, dating back to the time of Tamerlane, volumes for which acquisitive giaours gleefully relinquish gold pieces and which they carry all the way back to their own countries[…].

   2001, Orhan Pamuk, translated by Erdağ M. Göknar, My Name Is Red

   Byron’s tale called The Giaour is supposed to be told by a Turkish fisherman who had been employed all the day in the gulf of Ægi’na, and landed his boat at night-fall on the Piræus, now called the harbor of Port Leonê.[…]The tale is this: Leilah, the beautiful concubine of the Caliph Hasson^([sic]), falls in love with a giaour, flees from the seraglio, is overtaken by an emir, put to death, and cast into the sea. The giaour cleaves Hassan’s skull, flees for his life, and becomes a monk.

   2004, Ebenezer Cobham Brewer, “The Giaour”, in Character Sketches Of Romance, Fiction And The Drama, volume 2, page 85

   Synonyms: kafir