I've always heard it as 'kyebosh'. Dr Bill's link to Quinion has some interesting history and speculation. Apparently the word was first used here in London and appears in a work by Dickens.

M-W puts the kibosh on both the Yiddish and Irish notions of derivation here: http://www.m-w.com/cgi-bin/mwwod.pl

did someone put the kibosh on posting down here?

I've always said KYE-bosh, too...

> posting down here

At least the air's cleaner with no obvious iggrification ~ there's no-one putting the kibosh on every thread in sight!

ha, mav! GMTA. :-x

> At least the air's cleaner with no obvious iggrification

'twas my very thought...

<smile>

Yeah, kinda nice down here below the fold...

I've heard both kah-BOSH and KYE-bosh. Grew up and still live in Ohio.

New York City here, as least formative-years-wise. (Upper Bronx, at that.) Definitely KYE-bosh.

I'm new at this, but I remember seeing an explanation of the origin of 'kibosh' a long time ago, I don't remember where, but it seemed at the time to be a fairly respectable source. Their explanation was that, way back when, in a law court, if the judge was about to pronounce a sentence of death, he ceremonially laid a square of black linen over his wig before he spoke. This was in the British Isles, could have been Ireland, Scotland, Wales, or England itself. That square of black linen was called the 'kibosh' or death cap.
Regards, Pearliemay

Hi there!

On former page the links give already the informtion you asked for. Al anwers give no full clearity.

kibosh
1836, kye-bosk, in slang phrase put the kibosh on, of unknown origin, despite intense speculation. Looks Yiddish, but origin in early 19c. English slang seems to argue against this. One candidate is Ir. caip bháis, caipín báis "cap of death," sometimes said to be the black cap a judge would don when pronouncing a death sentence, but in other sources identified as a gruesome method of execution "employed by Brit. forces against 1798 insurgents" [Bernard Share, "Slanguage, A Dictionary of Irish Slang"]. Or it may somehow be connected with Turkish bosh (see bosh).

(from Online Ethymology Dictionary.)Don't ask me what Meta -words mean.

here's a thread that looks dead. Re-enliven it, let's.
We say kye-bosh and the other day there was an old
British movie on a classical station in which the judge
put a black cloth over his wig. I wondered what that meant,
and now I have a fairly good idea,by reading this site.
It is amazing how much one can learn, we from each other.
Thanks for having me!

I'm not sure what a 'meta word' is either, but ZUBENELGENUBI, might be one.
Accents on the ben and nu syllables: it is a star in the constellation Libra.

There is only one online dictionary entry, Google gives a lot.
Main Entry: meta-word
Part of Speech: n
Definition: a word describing another word; by extension, a word in a computer program that means something other than its literal meaning, esp. that is part of the programming language
Webster's New Millennium™ Dictionary of English, Preview Edition (v 0.9.7)
Copyright © 2003-2009 Dictionary.com, LLC
Cite This Source

Zubenelgenubi Nice star

> ZUBENELGENUBI

Obi-Wan Kenobi's cousin?

You'll never be the true astronomer neither. Sigh.
But you can sing.

ZUBENELGENUBI

Interesting word. It's from Arabic, as are many astronomical terms. There are two other stars in Libra that begin with zuben (< Arabic al-zuban 'the claw').

• alpha Librae, Zubenelgenubi 'southern claw' (< al-zuban al-janubiyy)
• beta Librae, Zubeneschamali 'northern claw' (< al-zuban al-shamaliyyah)
• gamma Librae, Zubenelakrab 'scorpion's claw' (< al-zuban al-aqrab)

[Addendum: Arabic janub 'south' < janaba 'to turn aside' is cognate with Hebrew ganebh 'to steal' and Yiddish ganef 'thief' (link)]

If you click 'stars' in that site you can see that half of Arabia is in the sky. Wonderful site . stars

what? Star Wars ain't true astronomy?


but thanks! :¬ )

Thanks for the site Bran, I love it.