Definitions
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
- n. A chalicelike holder for a hot coffee cup, typically made of ornamented metal, used in the Middle East.
Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- n. A holder for a coffee-cup: a term used throughout the Levant. These holders are usually of metal and of ornamental design in openwork. Their immediate object is to prevent the hot cup from burning the fingers.
Wiktionary
- n. an ornamental container designed to hold a coffee cup and insulate it from the hand of the imbiber
GNU Webster's 1913
- n. A metallic cuplike stand used for holding a finjan.
WordNet 3.0
- n. an ornamental metal cup-shaped holder for a hot coffee cup
Etymologies
- Arabic ẓarf, container.
Examples
“It was served in small cups without handles (known as fincan), which were placed in holders known as zarf (from the Arabic word, meaning container, envelope) to protect the cup and also the fingers of the drinker from the hot fluid.”
“Muslims have a fantastic ability to turn on and off their "deeply sincere" beliefs when it comes to fooling non-Muslims, whether selling in a souk (that metalwork zarf-and-finjan set in Morocco, the hubble-bubble pipe in Egypt, the carpet in Damascus), or outside the souk, selling Infidels a bill of goods.”
“Yeh log toh hameshaa hii aallah-zarf log rahe hain (people of higher intelect), how can we imagine to put ourselves at a higher level vis-a-vis them and do the critiqing on them because we can do critiqing on another person only when we are at a level which is "one plus" the person we are attempting to criticise.”
“i projeler dahilinde belirli zamanlar zarf? nda vatan?”
Lists
These user-created lists contain the word ‘zarf’.
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WWF WTF?
Ever play "Words With Friends" with someone and they throw down some strange, unlikely group of letters that makes even the most mild and squeaky clean tongued person say "whiskey tango foxtrot"? ...
oorie, sangar, merl, cwm, doum, weir, jura, invar, lawine, tapa, waw, shog and 374 more...
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Silly-sounding words
Serious words that sound silly when you say them
philosophunculist, argy-bargy, Labradoodle, shittah, shittim, floccinaucinihili..., succedaneum, honorificabilitud..., fag-ma-fuff, buffarilla, yazzihamper, mammothrept and 140 more...
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O So Zhinsky!
zarf, liripipe, theandric, tazza, bobeche, autotelic, gonfalon, refulgent, crepuscular, caduceus, knop, labarum and 31 more...
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It means what?
Definitions you'd never surmise from their spelling.
vexillologist, biocide, earworm, moon carrots, logorrhea, uberous, unguiculate, uropoietic, reciprocornous, recrudescence, rectrix, succorrhoea and 39 more...
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[Open] Yes, it really is a word.
Bona fide words that appear misspelled or made-up. See also “Correctly-spelled words that look like misspellings of other words”.
resplendishant, apprehensible, splendent, splendiferous, magnifical, queem, ostentiferous, squiz, researchful, snaffle, blench, debulition and 22 more...
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Surprising four-letter words
I imagine most of these will be Anglo-Saxon, not likely to crop up in the average day's conversation, and thus excellent for Scrabble. ("most" is too common, likewise "will" and even "crop", in an...
blet, quim, clit, buff, sire, wiki, blog, loam, waft, heft, mare, lilt and 68 more...
bilby They even provide them for you when you order a cup of tea on the train ... very elegant. May 12, 2008
rolig You see something like this all the time in Russia, where they drink hot tea in a glass (called �?такан – stakan) which you hold with a metal holder, called под�?таканник – podstakannik, which means "under-stakan-device". I wonder if they got this from the Muslim Tatars who ruled Russia in the Middle Ages, and if so, maybe this podstakannik is cousin to the zarf. May 12, 2008
reesetee See finjan (the handleless coffee cup that fits inside a zarf). Feb 26, 2007
angharad the thing that goes around a coffee cup so that you don't burn your fingers Dec 2, 2006