shakhidka
n.— «You won’t find it in any Russian dictionary, but a single word dominates newspaper headlines and conversations in the street after two weeks of bombings and mayhem: shakhidka, or female Islamist suicide bomber. A mix of the Arabic word shaheed (martyr) and the Russian female suffix “ka,” a literal translation might be female martyr.» —“Russians adapt Arabic to describe women bombers” by Michael Steen in Moscow Reuters Sept. 7, 2004. (source: Double-Tongued Dictionary)
Further reading
Many of us struggled with the Old English poem “Beowulf” in high school. But what if you could actually hear “Beowulf” in the English of today? There’s a new translation by Maria Dahvana Headley that uses contemporary...
What if, instead of being an inanimate object, a dictionary were alive? That’s the idea behind a lavishly illustrated new children’s book called The Dictionary Story (Bookshop|Amazon) by Oliver Jeffers and Sam Winston. This is part of a...