dahabieh

English

Alternative forms

• dahabeah, dahabeeah, dahabeeyah, dahabiah, dahabieh, dahabiya, dahabiyah, dahabiyeh, dhahabiyya

Etymology

From Arabic ذَهَبِيَّة (ḏahabiyya, literally “golden one”).

Noun

dahabieh (plural dahabiehs)

1. A traditional Egyptian sailing-boat.
   • 1932, John Dos Passos, “The House of Morgan”, in 1919:

     The last year of his life he went up the Nile on a dahabiyeh

   • 2007 August 5, Lisa Fugard, “Against the Current”, in New York Times‎^[1]:

     Much has changed since the Victorians traveled in large comfortable boats called dahabiehs — “a bit like floating down the Nile in a brownstone,” Mahoney says.

   • 2021 February 17, E. M. Forster, Delphi Complete Works of E. M. Forster (Illustrated), Delphi Classics, →ISBN:

     dahabiyeh — that 'trip in a dahabiyeh as far as Biskra' which Mr. Max Beerbohm so commends to lady novelists, and which has so often been taken by Mr. Robert Hicheris. You know what it is like: how the song of the Nubian boatmen mingles […]

   • 2013 August 21, Manning, Land Of The Pharaohs, Routledge, →ISBN, page 61:

     The dahabiyeh, gentle reader, is a boat in form and outline not unlike the barges of the City Companies in the days when the Thames was to Londoners what the Nile is to the Egyptians. Its saloons and cabins are on deck.

   • 2019 December 10, Bret Harte, Condensed Novels: New Burlesques, Good Press:

     And when the sun rose, it was upon the white sails of the dahabiyeh, the vacant pyramid, and the slumbering Sphinx. There was great excitement at the Cairo Hotel the next morning. The Princess and the Chevalier had disappeared, […]