Shikar

Part of speech: noun, verb

Definitions

1. The pursuit of wild animals for sport, especially large game in India and similar regions ; the wild animals that are caught or killed during such a hunt
2. Big-game hunting carried out as a sport in the Indian subcontinent ; the creatures that a hunter has tracked down or brought down
3. The activity of tracking and killing wild beasts for pleasure ; the quarry that is taken or bagged by a hunting party

Etymology: "Shikar" arrived in English from India, where the word had already travelled a long road. It comes from Urdu and Hindi, in which "śikār" (or "شکار") means game, prey, or the act of hunting, and those languages took it from Classical Persian "šikār" with the same sense. Persian was the prestige language of courts across the subcontinent for centuries, so the word spread with it into the everyday speech of northern India. British officers and sportsmen in colonial India adopted it for the hunting of big game such as tigers, bears and deer, and it passed into English in that setting. The word stayed tied to the sporting expedition and its trophies, so an English speaker who uses it is usually borrowing a little of the vocabulary of the colonial hunting field.

Synonyms: hunting, big game hunting