How sweet with a golden sanam
You spun the slow moments away."
In Seton-Karr, i. 19.
1785.—"You are desired to lay a silver fanam, a piece worth three pence, upon the ground. This, which is the smallest of all coins, the elephant feels about till he finds."—Caraccioli's Life of Clive, i. 288.
1803.—"The pay I have given the boatmen is one gold fanam for every day they do not work, and two gold fanams for every day they do."—From Sir A. Wellesley, in Life of Munro, i. 342.
FAN-PALM, s. The usual application of this name is to the Borassus flabelliformis, L. (see [BRAB], [PALMYRA]), which is no doubt the type on which our ladies' fans have been formed. But it is also sometimes applied to the [Talipot] (q.v.); and it is exceptionally (and surely erroneously) applied by Sir L. Pelly (J.R.G.S. xxxv. 232) to the "Traveller's Tree," i.e. the Madagascar Ravenala (Urania speciosa).
FANQUI, s. Chin. fan-kwei, 'foreign demon'; sometimes with the affix tsz or tsŭ, 'son'; the popular Chinese name for Europeans. ["During the 15th and 16th centuries large numbers of black slaves of both sexes from the E. I. Archipelago were purchased by the great houses of Canton to serve as gate-keepers. They were called 'devil slaves,' and it is not improbable that the term 'foreign devil,' so freely used by the Chinese for foreigners, may have had this origin."—Ball, Things Chinese, 535.]
FARÁSH, FERÁSH, FRASH, s. Ar.—H. farrāsh, [farsh, 'to spread (a carpet)']. A menial servant whose proper business is to spread carpets, pitch tents, &c., and, in fact, in a house, to do housemaid's work; employed also in Persia to administer the bastinado. The word was in more common use in India two centuries ago than now. One of the highest hereditary officers of Sindhia's Court is called the Farāsh-khāna-wālā. [The same word used for the tamarisk tree (Tamarix gallica) is a corr. of the Ar. farās.]
c. 1300.—"Sa grande richesce apparut en un paveillon que li roys d'Ermenie envoia au roy de France, qui valoit bien cinq cens livres; et li manda li roy de Hermenie que uns ferrais au Soudanc dou Coyne li avoit donnei. Ferrais est cil qui tient les paveillons au Soudanc et qui li nettoie ses mesons."—Jehan, Seigneur de Joinville, ed. De Wailly, p. 78.
c. 1513.—"And the gentlemen rode ... upon horses from the king's stables, attended by his servants whom they call farazes, who groom and feed them."—Correa, Lendas, II. i. 364.