December 12, 1996

scimitar

We do know that the word "cimeters" refers to weapons...what kind? It is in no dictionary we have. Thanks.

You have the misfortune to have chosen a weapon found in many, many different spellings. The usual one is scimitar, and that describes a type of curved, single-edged sword that is wider near the end, used especially by Arabs and Turks.

People whose business it is to collect such things have found about 40 different spellings of the word over the centuries, and of the other variants your cimeter (also the earliest form of the word) was the most common, and was still in use in the nineteenth century. Edward Gibbon, in the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, used the "cimeter" spelling, and Spenser also spelled it with an initial c-.

Scimitar was borrowed in the mid-sixteenth century from French cimeterre and Italian scimitarra (the source of the usual spelling). Its ultimate origin is uncertain, though Persian shimsheer 'a type of sword' has been suggested.