Bill:

I hate it when this happens. Along comes a list like this, and one, just one, of the words shouldn't be included, and it makes me question everything in the list. Sheriff in the sense of a county officer is not from Arabic, according to my dictionary. So I looked at some of the other words.

Carat is also suspect, since it came to us through Arabic from Greek. It is akin to keratin, believe it or not.

My dictionary does not substantiate either garbage or garble as being derived from Arabic. I also looked in OED. Nothing there about Arabic either.

TEd


TEd