aba

A coarse, often striped, felted fabric from the Middle East, woven from goat or camel hair.

Noun

  1. A coarse, often striped, felted fabric from the Middle East, woven from goat or camel hair.
  2. A loose-fitting sleeveless garment, made from aba or silk, worn by Arabs.
    • 'A pale mauve abba such as you buy in the East.' - 1934, Agatha Christie, chapter 5, in Murder on the Orient Express, London: HarperCollins, published 2017, page 110:
    • Here Nessim would sit night after night in the winter, dressed in his old rust-coloured abba, staring gravely at Betelgeuse, or hovering over books of calculations for all the world like a medieval soothsayer. - 1957,...
  3. An outer garment made of the above, very simple in form, worn by the Arabs of the desert. The illustration shows such an aba, made of two breadths of stuff sewed together to make an oblong about four by nine feet.
  4. Such a garment that is specific to women.
    • Holonym: hijab

    Coordinate Terms: burka chador chadri niqab

Origin

Borrowed from Arabic عَبَاءَة (ʕabāʔa). Compare abaya.

Forms

abas abba

Synonyms

abaya

Noun Entry 2

  1. An altazimuth used for astronomy on either land or water.

Origin

* From the name of its creator, the French explorer A. T. d' Abbadie.

Forms

abas

Noun Entry 3

  1. An electric fish of species Gymnarchus niloticus (frankfish, freshwater rat-tail, African knifefish), found in swamps, lakes and rivers in Africa.

Forms

abas