Smous
noun, verb ·Rare ·Advanced level
Definitions
- 1 A peddler. South-Africa, historical
- 2 A Jew from Germany or Eastern Europe. South-Africa, historical
- 1 To go about selling goods, as an itinerant peddler. South-Africa, historical
"Not only South Africans, White and Black, but fortune hunters from Europe and America, Indian and Chinese labourers and traders, and Jews from the ghettoes (sic) and shtetles of Eastern Europe, who had come to 'smous' […]"
Synonyms
All synonymsExample
More examples"Not only South Africans, White and Black, but fortune hunters from Europe and America, Indian and Chinese labourers and traders, and Jews from the ghettoes (sic) and shtetles of Eastern Europe, who had come to 'smous' […]"
Etymology
Borrowed from Afrikaans smous or Dutch smous, from a Yiddish word whose precise origin is uncertain. One theory is that it derives from Yiddish משה (moyshe, “Moses”), pronounced moushe in Western Yiddish, from Hebrew מֹשֶׁה (moshé, “Moses”).
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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.