Gombroon

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. The old name of the Persian Gulf port now called Bandar Abbas ; a kind of white or pale pottery once made in Persia and exported to Europe
2. An earlier name for the Iranian port of Bandar Abbas ; a style of opaque, whitish Persian ceramic ware from the seventeenth century
3. The former title of the Persian seaport Bandar Abbas ; a category of fine Persian earthenware with a milky glaze traded widely in the 1600s

Etymology: Gombroon was the name European traders used for Bandar Abbas, the port on the Persian Gulf coast of Iran. Through the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, English merchants of the East India Company shipped goods through the town, and their usage gave the place a name that survived in the trade long after the city itself was known by its Persian name. The word that followed from it was a type of pottery and porcelain associated with the port, the ware that passed through its markets and was carried back to Europe. Because the name was a trader's coinage for a foreign place, the term is a clear example of how commercial routes can fix a place name in a language that is not the local one. Its meaning is tied to the goods that moved through the port rather than to the town's own identity, which is why the word is now mostly found in collectors' and historians' writing.