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zi

Pronunciation: /ˈzi/

“zi” is an Albanian word. Its 20 meanings in English:

adjective

  1. black (of colour)
  2. dark, as opposed to a lighter colour
  3. dirty (of water); built for dirty water
  4. unfortunate, wretched; desolate, gloomy
  5. evil, bad

noun

  1. black person
  2. unfortunate, wretched, desolate person
  3. black (player with the black chess pieces)
  4. black (colour), blackness
  5. mourning (sorrow; clothes)
  6. gloom, gloominess
  7. great trouble, suffering
  8. Used to reinforce interrogative and exclamative sentences.
  9. mourning (sorrow for someone's death)
  10. mourning (clothes)
  11. great misfortune
  12. famine, dearth, esp. scarcity of bread
  13. great greed for something, esp. food

adverb

  1. in black
  2. very badly, wrongly, unkindly

Etymology

First attested in the 17th century in this form, already 16th in its now obsolete feminine form e zeshkë (“black”). The plural të zinj is recent, built on analogy of other masculine nouns ending in stressed /-ˈi/, and supplanted the earlier të zez. The irregular paradigm may reflect e zezë f sg < *gʷed(ʰ)yā, të zez m pl < *gʷed(ʰ)yoi, zi f (“mourning”, noun) < *gʷed(ʰ)íyā. Has been compared to…

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Definitions are from Wiktionary, extracted by Kaikki.org, and are available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.