shufti
/ˈʃʊf.ti/
Word Rarity
Very rare
Frequency: Zipf frequency 0.00 in modern English
12
Scrabble Score
6
Letters
1
Syllables
6
Unique Chars
Meaning
Example Sentences
- ""Perkins, we are asking you to be that one man. I want you to lay down your life, Perkins. We need a futile gesture at this stage. It will raise the whole tone of the war. Get up in a crate, Perkins, pop over to Bremen, take a shufti, don't come back. Goodbye, Perkins. God, I wish I was going too.""
- ""Caucasus mountains," said the driver. "I think. Let's have a shufti at the map.""
- "2005, J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, Raincoast Books ; Bloomsbury, page 431, "When we come face to face with one [a ghost] down a dark alley we're going to be having a shufti to see if it's solid, aren't we, we're not going to be asking, 'Excuse me, are you the imprint of a departed soul?'""
Etymology
UK 1940s, originally military slang. From Egyptian Arabic شُفْتِ، شُفْتِي (šufti, “have you seen?”, literally “you saw”), a conjugation of شَاف (šāf, “to see”).
Word Breakdown
- Root: ش و ف
Regional Pronunciation
- American English: /ˈʃʊf.ti/
- British English: /ˈʃʊf.ti/