AWAD for Thu 2003-01-23 00:21 says "pharaoh" comes from [ancient] Egyptian "pr"="house" + "o"="great". However, according to Egyptian Grammar by Gardiner, this is way off the beam. "pr" means "great" and "h'h" (that's a glottal stop in the middle) means "house". Hieroglyphics doesn't represent vowels. The glottal stop is customarily represented by "a". I'm sorry I can't post the beautiful hieroglyphs for those words here. The Egyptian "pr" is the same word as the "bar" in "bar mitzvah".