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Three recent theories of “kibosh”

By Anatoly Liberman

The phrase put the kibosh on surfaced in texts in the early thirties of the nineteenth century. For a long time etymologists have been trying to discover what kibosh means and where it came from. Hebrew, Arabic, Turkish, Gaelic Irish, and French have been explored for that purpose. I have twice discussed the word in this blog: on 19 May and on 28 July 2010. My modest aim was to call attention to the existing conjectures and sort them out. I also thought that the unexpected sense of kibosh “Portland cement” might furnish a clue to the sought-for etymology. No one supported my idea, and I am aware of three recent attempts to solve the puzzle. They belong to J. Peter Maher (who has thought about this word for a long time), Stephen Goranson, and David L. Gold. The first has not been published in full, but I have Professor Maher’s permission to use the versions he sent me (some of them exist on the Internet). Goranson’s work appeared in the periodical Comments on Etymology (2010) and Gold’s in Revista Alicantina de Estudios Ingleses (2011). I assume that neither Comments on Etymology nor Revista Alicantina has wide currency among the readers of this blog (however, Goranson’s hypothesis has been referenced by Michael Quinion in World Wide Words). It may therefore be useful for our readers to have a brief summary of the views of the three scholars side by side.

The only authentic kibosh. All others are counterfeit. But which of the three is the authentic-est of all?
The only authentic kibosh. All others are counterfeit. But which of the three is the authentic-est of all?

The earliest attestation of kibosh in the OED1 went back to Dickens’s kyebosk (sic; 1836), but now several occurrences of the word in newspapers for 1834 are known. The predating per se would have had little value because if some word caught Dickens’s attention in 1835 or 1836, naturally, it must have existed earlier. Yet thanks to it we have proof that kibosh indeed emerged in “low” speech around 1830+. Whether it led an underground existence before it turned up in London slang cannot be decided. No etymology offered so far explained why kibosh conquered the capital when it did. What provoked the vogue for it? Its original pronunciation also remains a riddle. Even if we disregard Dickens’s –bosk with its strange –sk (a typo?), there is no certainty that the word was stressed on ki– or that the first vowel was “short” (as in sit, rather than as in site); the spelling kibbosh has also been recorded. At least one old woman who has participated in the Internet discussion said that she had always heard kibosh stressed on the second syllable. Whatever the origin of kibosh, it does resemble several homophones from various languages, and the coincidence, perhaps fortuitous, may have contributed to the word’s dissemination. With the present evidence at our disposal, the chance of unearthing the origin of kibosh is vanishingly small.

J. Peter Maher traces kibosh to French caboche “head (informal), noodle, nut” or rather the English verb cabosh (from French) “to cut off a stag’s head behind the ears (with no part of the neck in view) as a trophy.” Both the noun and the verb are common terms in heraldry. In French, caboche, an irreverent word for a human head, has also become a surname (Caboche). “It was the Cockneys of London who turned the aristocratic verb cabosh into a slang expression…. Likewise, a Cockney expression for the 1d./6p. coin was cabosh for the head of the monarch on coins.” Maher assumed that the story began with the verb and that the noun was formed from it. Usually etymologists derive the verb kibosh from the noun: “…we can say spin the ball or transform this into the style put a spin on the ball.” The development of kibosh was allegedly similar. Maher has no trust in the modern spelling of kibosh. In his opinion, i after k was an imperfect way of rendering the unstressed vowel of the first syllable, while “the spelling kyebosh is based on mispronunciation of the troublesome spelling kibosh.” This etymology does not say how a term of heraldry reached “the Cockneys,” but, as noted, no one has explored the zigzags of the word’s history from a putative etymon to nineteenth-century slang. It is not even clear whether those zigzags can be reconstructed.

Stephen Goranson. The issue of Comments on Etymology (CoE, 2010), mentioned above, contains a mass of material on the early attestation of kibosh (correspondence among several people and Gerald Cohen, the journal’s editor) and Cohen’s summary. It turned out that another researcher (Matthew Little) had offered the same etymology as Goranson, but his contribution (also to CoE!) was not published in 2009. However, Goranson’s material is incomparably richer than Little’s. His etymon of kibosh is kurbash “a long whip made of hippopotamus or rhinoceros hide used as an instrument of punishment in parts of the Muslim world.” Like kibosh, kurbash has been attested in many forms. The phrase put the kibosh on seems to presuppose that a kibosh is an object that can be raised or at least “put on.” (As we have seen, this reasoning did not go far with Maher.) Judging by the attestation, there was some confusion between kurbash and kibosh, at least in texts. The difficulties Goranson faces are predictable. Once again we are tied to a form with initial stress. Even in an r-less dialect ur and i (short) do not look like interchangeable spelling variants of the same unstressed vowel (schwa), the more so as even koorbash and korbash occur. From this point of view kibosh with long i fares even worse. (Long i makes us admit that today’s most common pronunciation of kibosh is due to its spelling image or to what Maher calls mispronunciation—a strange development for slang.) The word is exotic, and accepting it as the etymon of kibosh presupposes the familiarity of the London street with it some time before 1842. These obstacles are hard to explain away. My last remark will be unconnected with kurbash. In commenting on my post, Goranson wrote that kibosh “Portland cement,” the gloss to which I attached special importance, turned out to be impossible to verify. I have not dealt with this question since 2010.

David L. Gold informs us that his article, though it takes up 56 pages of the journal issue, is a reduced variant of a more comprehensive study. It will probably become a book when he brings it out. At present it contains 33 pages of text, 23 compact pages of notes (many of them highly entertaining), and an extensive but incomplete bibliography that features, among others, 42 references to his own works, some still in manuscript. Gold’s starting point is the clogmakers’ term kibosh “iron bar about a foot long that, when hot, is used to soften and smooth leather” (another long and menacing object!). Putting the kibosh on a clog might perhaps mean “finish the work.” Or did the idiom at its inception have the sense “to make the thing fit” (a recorded sense)? If so, a stag’s head and a whip fade out of the picture. Knowing nothing about the technology of clog making, I cannot judge at what stage a kibosh was put on the leather. Let experts comment on this detail; I will stick to my last. Other than that, the spread of a technical expression from some locality to the rest of the country (according to Gold, kibosh originated in the north of England) and becoming part of the universally known slang is possible. The very word slang has such a history, and professional language is a common source of colloquialisms.

However, Gold has hardly drawn the curtain over the bothersome problem. The main handicap is partly familiar to us from the previous exposition. Kybosh “an iron bar,” even if native, is a rare word, to say the least, and the phrase put the kibosh (on) has not been recorded in any technical description of clog making. The origin of the word kibosh, regardless of the collocation in which it occurs, also remains obscure. In the past, clogmakers used the verb bosh, sometimes alternating with burnish, whose sense was “rub waxed and oiled leather with a hot iron bar.” Gold suggested tracing bosh to burnish, but this derivation is unlikely for phonetic reasons. If bosh is the second part of kibosh, ki will be unaccounted for. Long ago, Charles P.G. Scott, the etymologist for The Century Dictionary, considered the possibility of ki– being identical with ca-, as in caboodle, or ker-, as in kerfuffle. Gold supported this idea, though he gave no reference to Scott. I am afraid both of them were wrong. This prefix of Celtic or Dutch origin is never stressed (as far as I can judge, unlike Maher, neither Scott nor Gold doubted the initial stress in kibosh), never has the form ki- with long i (that is, the diphthong ai: here again, unlike Maher, Scott and Gold took long i for granted), and is never added to stylistically neutral words (though the stylistic register of bosh cannot be assessed). One might even suggest that bosh was “abstracted” from kibosh by way of back formation. I also wonder (and in this I am quite alone) why people said the kibosh rather than a kibosh. Is the definite article here of the same type as in spare the rod, spoil the child?

The word kibosh, English clogmakers’ lingo notwithstanding, looks foreign. But at the moment it is “stateless,” like so many other refugees of our time.

Anatoly Liberman is the author of Word Origins…And How We Know Them as well as An Analytic Dictionary of English Etymology: An Introduction. His column on word origins, The Oxford Etymologist, appears on the OUPblog each Wednesday. Send your etymology question to him care of [email protected]; he’ll do his best to avoid responding with “origin unknown.”

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Image credit: (1) Stag’s head erased (heraldry). Public domain via Wikimedia Commons. (2) The ‘Chicote’ or whip via NYPL Digital Library. (3) A pair of leather clogs by Vincent van Gogh/ Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Recent Comments

  1. Stephen Goranson

    More evidence for early use of kibosh is available than has been presented here. E.g., a broadside (“Penal Servitude!”) estimated by the expert collector J. A. Ferguson as dated ca. 1830 includes: “There is one little dodge I am thinking,/ That would put your profession all to smash,/ It would put on the kibosh like winking,/ That is if they was to introduce the lash.” Here, I say, the kibosh is in apposition with the lash.
    Additional evidence is available in two sources, neither of which is cited in the David L. Gold paper mentioned above: (1) The American Dialect Society discussion list; searchable archive available online: http://listserv.linguistlist.org/cgi-bin/wa?S1=ads-l
    (2) The above-mentioned paper in Comments on Etymology v. 40 (2010) pages 12-48. Upon request (email at my website) I will, for a limited time, send a pdf file of the article.

  2. Stephen Goranson

    I have notes on articles on kibosh that I may send later, but, for now, pass along an early use of kibosh–actually Ki’bosh–that I found today. This dates after the stories about Wellington having put the kibosh on the Whigs and having floored (not decapitated) them, printed in numerous British newspapers in Nov. and Dec. 1834, and probably after the broadside (ca. 1830, according to the expert, J. A. Ferguson) “Penal Servitude!” that evidently equates the kibosh and the lash, but earlier (as far as I know) than other reported uses of more-or-less this spelling and sense, including by that by Dickens. Many spellings of kurbash etc. (whip, lash) are attested earlier many times.

    Bell’s Life in London and Sporting Chronicle (London). Sunday Feb. 1, 1835. Issue 644. p. 3 col. 1.
    headline: “THE FLASH TAILORS.” It supposedly reports London “dodges” by a firm of “builders of hunting kicksies [breeches, trousers].” “Nimrods” are invited to try “White Hunting Buckskin Cloth” that “some of the best Workmen Across Country…prefer…to Leather for Wet Work.” Yet such are still called leather worked via “an _Unknown Artful Plan_, having enter’d into a Contract for Seven Years for the supply of Skins from the largest Parks in _Fudduxshire_.–To put the _Ki’bosh_ on those who Gammon to slave for Nix, they have chalk’d out the following list of charges….”

  3. Stephen Goranson

    Correcting myself, there were two more uses of kibosh before the Feb. 1, 1835 use in Bell’s, the periodical in which Dickens’ use appeared later.
    As for J. P. Maher’s proposal, the quote with an 18 pence coin was unfortunate, as the existence of such had already been questioned, and a monarch “head” on any one British coin would hardly be distinctive anyway. Rather the later development connected the Hebrew word for life, the letters representing 8 + 10.
    The clogmaker tool name would appear to be a later development, too. And kibosh is first attested in London, not the north. And Douglas Wilson had already in 2010 very tentatively raised the possibility of a clogmaker tool, in the ADS-L archive that Gold’s article neglected to cite. For a (late, 1893) description of kibosh use in clogmaking–not the last step, see:
    https://babel.hathitrust.org/shcgi/pt?id=njp.32101076039203;view=1up;seq=392
    And should we distingiush finish as in create and finish as in destroy? And the sense of whip/lash may have preceded and led to the later senses.
    (Note the use also of gammon in three early examples.)
    The kurbash/kibosh was known in London in the 1830s, where reporter spelling of Cockney did not always follow some handbook.
    Or does some word of more suitable sense and spelling exist, one that is foreign but not too exotic, one that is better-known but that has eluded linguists for well over a century?

  4. Stephen Goranson

    As for “the kibosh” rather than “a kibosh,” perhaps compare:
    face the music, kick the bucket, bought the farm, sent up the river, sent to the big house/the pen….

  5. Stephen Goranson

    “Kibosh” and politics. In the early 1830s London debate was lively about flogging, and election reform (mentioned in the broadside song that used kibosh), tariffs, and colonial policy. Several of the earliest (pre-Dickens) uses of “kibosh” appear in contexts of political controversy, especially against the Whigs. Why whipping Whigs?
    Perhaps worth mentioning: the Whigs were criticized by radicals for failing to abolish flogging in the military. Here’s an 1832 cartoon against the Whig Secretary for War, John Hobhouse, who had called for the abolition of flogging before joining the government, but then suggested a limit of 300.
    http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=njp.32101064172909;view=1up;seq=218
    A 7 Dec, 1834 article (The Age, London) that uses kibosh also complained that the Whigs failed to abolish flogging.
    When Wellington returned to government, he was said (in several 1834 newspapers) to have “put the kibosh” on the Whigs, flooring them.
    The Age [London] 18 Jan 1835:
    “The late First Lord of the Admiralty [James Graham, who served from 1830 to 1834, when he resigned] puts what Bill Ingilby calls the “kibosh” upon the Whig lies….”
    William (Amcotts) Ingilby was a radical MP (I haven’t found such a quote from him yet). Association of flogging by kurbash and by kibosh (among other spellings) may become clearer.
    My comment(above) gave a faulty link. The description of clogmaking using a kibosh before attaching the leather to the wooden part is from Work: an illustrated magazine of practice and theory for all workmen, professional and amateur. vol.5 (1893–many decades later than the early uses of kibosh/whip/lash–so probably not important for the origin) page 372
    http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=njp.32101076039203;view=1up;seq=392

  6. […] been first recorded in its “cradle.” If we knew more about the center of dissemination of hobo, kibosh, and their likes, we might be able to offer truly persuasive hypotheses of their origin and discard […]

  7. […] Kibosh definitely for the last time. The pre-Dickens quotations unearthed by Stephen Goranson are of great value because, among other things, they deal with flogging. Apparently, in the 1830s and later those who used kibosh understood it is an object with which to beat an opponent. This is natural: after all, we “put” the kibosh on things. Couldn’t reference to kibosh in just that context be a well-thought out pun, provided that the meaning of kibosh “whip” was widely known? What also bothers me is the exotic nature of all the proposed etymons and the necessity to give preference to one etymology as final. I am not quite ready to do so, but I admit that my caution may be a hindrance to the solution. […]

  8. John Peter Maher

    There is nothing exotic about a Middle English source, which was around centuries before printing. Julian Franklyn q.v. was himself a Cockney and a scholar of Cockneys as well as of heraldry. Arabic Kirbach means ‘lash'(noun). The purpose of the instrument is subjugation, not annihilation. The practice is still in use in Saudi Arabia, and the word is known in Russia and Turkey etc. You can see the K. on Turkish Google & YouTube. It means the Arab lash, not annihilation. A beaten foe is your slave; a dead one can’t work for you. Lashed sailors live to climb the yards and rig sails. The captain cannot sail with dead sailors. Cabosh/kibosh does not mean to lash, but to ‘finish off’, which is what cabocher is: ‘to cut off the head’ of a beast that has already been killed. Kye-bosh is a mispronunciation of Kibosh, which is a cacography for cabosh/caboche. Compare the readings pri-vacy / US and priv-acy UK, vi-tamin v. vit-amin, kabob for kebap.

  9. John Peter Maher

    Chatting about lemma and gloss is a waste of breath and writing. The true test of meaning is translation. Translate to any language a sentence from Arabic with “kirbach” in it. Translate an English sentence with “cabosh” and “kibosh” to any other language. The Arabic result cannot employ the “K” word. Likewise, translating the English words as “K” in question will never be accepted in Arabic. Try French, German, Russian… Quit the netymologizing and translate.

  10. Michael Darvell

    My only recollection of the use of the word ‘kibosh’ comes in the First World War song ‘Belgium Put the Kibosh on the Kaiser’, first recorded by Mark Sheridan in 1914 and featured in the stage show and subsequent film of ‘Oh, What a Lovely War!’, by Charles Chilton and Joan Littlewood, currently being revived at the Theatre Royal in Stratford East (London) for the show’s 50th anniversary. In 1964 it marked the half century since the First World War began, and now marks the centenary of the First World War.

  11. […] Kibosh definitely for the last time. The pre-Dickens quotations unearthed by Stephen Goranson are of great value because, among other things, they deal with flogging. Apparently, in the 1830s and later those who used kibosh understood it is an object with which to beat an opponent. This is natural: after all, we “put” the kibosh on things. Couldn’t reference to kibosh in just that context be a well-thought out pun, provided that the meaning of kibosh “whip” was widely known? What also bothers me is the exotic nature of all the proposed etymons and the necessity to give preference to one etymology as final. I am not quite ready to do so, but I admit that my caution may be a hindrance to the solution. […]

  12. […] Three recent theories on the word “kibosh” […]

  13. Larry Trekell

    Kibosh, pronounced kuh-bosh’, comes from the Hebrew for fuller, ka-bac, pronounced caw-bas’, in the sense of whitening, finishing, or getting the dirt out. See the interlinear for Malachi 3:2. To whiten, or finish fabric, they would put the fuller to trampling it in the soap, or put the caw-bas’ on it.

  14. Gavin Redknap

    I’m from east London. The word ‘bosh’ is interchangeable with ‘bash’ or ‘punch’ though the latter two are more frequent. It therefore follows that kibosh is an implement for inflicting pain of some sort. I’d put more weight on the word having a French or Jewish origin than an Irish one, given the number of French Huguenots and Jews who lived in the east end at the time.

  15. Lisette

    The closest parallel to kibosh is the Hebrew word for conquer, vanquish, or suppress. The infinitive form is לִכבּוֹשׁ — pronounced as leek-bosh. As I said, though, that is the infinitive form of the word. In regular conjugated usage, the infinitive form would drop the initial letter L, which means “to,” and morph into just kibosh.

  16. De

    The Irish origin I’ve come across for kybosh is that it is derived from ‘cap bás’ meaning ‘death cap’ as in the black cap a judge would done when pronouncing a death sentence. This would seem to fit with the meaning of kybosh as putting a stop to something.

    I’m not a scholar, I just find these things interesting.

  17. Bill Kobabe

    What about Kybosh brand DDT?
    When Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring came out, and DDT was banned, this expression experienced a surge in popularity. The word took on a new meaning, to regulate something out of existence, and returned it to popular use. You can still buy this product in many other countries, BTW…

  18. Linda F

    Apologies if I’ve overlooked a previous suggestion, but might there be a link with the words ‘kibosh’ and ‘caboose’? This would correspond with both a sense of finality (ie putting the last carriage on a freight train) and the use of the definite article.

    Dictionary.com give the origin of ‘caboose’ as follows

    ‘1740–50; < early modern Dutch cabūse (Dutch kabuis) ship's galley, storeroom; compare Low German kabuus, kabüse, Middle Low German kabuse booth, shed; further origin uncertain’

  19. raymond hislop

    Very interesting. I happened to.use the word in a discussion with Rttur at the round table,where it appeared to be a prohibited word,far worse than a swear word.Thus I went looking for its origin.Hebrew and Arabic sound accurate. The lash is probably accurate as that would make it a blood sacrifice matter,totally unacceptable at the Rttur table.Rttur 25 heads of Galaxies. Revelation 5:14

  20. just a thought

    Cur Bosh…. to sic the dog on a irrational or unreasonable putting a stop to it.

  21. Silvia Luciani

    Could it come from the Italian word “capoccia”, a familiar, slightly derogatory term that stands for “big empty head”?

  22. Stuart Vickery

    See Robert Twigger’s “Red Nile” (a truly excellent read). Page 342.

    Kourbash, a braided strap of hippo hide used by the Ottomans in Egypt, and undoubtedly elsewhere.

    The word probably imported to Britain by early African explorers, whose exploits were as popular then as Armstrong’s moon landing was later.

    Strangely, still occasionally used by Baby Boomers in Australia (moi!) to the bemusement of Generation Tweet.

  23. David Scholefield

    In fact: “When Boris Johnson wrote two articles in 2016, for and against leaving the EU, and settled for the latter, he too may have declaimed: “Anerriphtho kybos.” It certainly put the kibosh on David Cameron’s plans.”

  24. […] the way, the kibosh was an iron bar used two hundred years ago by cobblers in the north of England to flatten leather as […]

  25. Josephine

    Not an erudite myself, I am wondering, however, whether the French caboche is somehow linked to the Italian ‘capoccia’ (pronounced ka-po-chah) -meaning, amongst other things, ‘chief’ or boss (from the Latin caput I am presuming) ?

  26. Meg Murphy

    Like De, I learned the origin of this word is Irish caba bais, “cape of death”. Phonetically it would be run together to sound like cabash, the two “ba” becoming one, accented evenly on both of the a’s. Bas being nominative of death, bais being genetive with the slender i making the s an sh sound in English. So caba bash becomes cabash. As a New Englander of Irish heritage I’ve heard it pronounced in the greater Boston area as cabash, though it’s spelled kibosh for some reason. Appearing in print in the 1830s in London as a Cockney word it would make sense that it had an Irish origin. Irish speakers in the 1830s in London would have far outnumbered Arabic, French and Turkish speakers.

  27. […] Anatoly. Tres teorías recientes de «kibosh». OUPblog, 14 de agosto de 2013, consultado el 22 de febrero de […]

  28. […] Anatoly. Three recent theories of “kibosh.” OUPblog, August 14, 2013, accessed February 22, […]

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