by Helen Kabura
(Boston, MA, USA)
Word Meaning — n. a patchwork garment
Why I Think It's A Cool Word — My goal is to play this 7-letter word, probably as a hook to KA, IRK, HI, etc., but wouldn't mind playing it as a parallel bingo - at least one of the kays would have to be a blank.
As it happens, we use a form of this word in Gikuyu (A language spoken in the Kenyan highlands). Whether the European misssionaries popularised it in the early 20th century is unclear to me, but remains my strongest supposition, and my search for its etymology met inroads the most salient being that it is not in most common dictionaries. The definition in my Hasbro Scrabble software is all I have for now.