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coolie
A coolie (alternatively spelled cooli, cooly, quli, koelie, and other such variations), during the 19th and early 20th century, was a term for a locally sourced unskilled labourer hired by a company, mainly from the Indian subcontinent or South China.
Today, it is used varyingly as a legal inoffensive word (for example, in India for helpers carrying luggage in railway stations) and also used as a racial slur in Africa for certain people from Asia,〔Most current dictionaries do not record any offensive meaning ("an unskilled laborer or porter usually in or from the Far East hired for low or subsistence wages" (Merriam-Webster )) or make a distinction between an offensive meaning in referring to "a person from the Indian subcontinent or of Indian descent" and an at least originally inoffensive, old-fashioned meaning, for example "''dated'' an unskilled native labourer in India, China, and some other Asian countries" ((Compact Oxford English Dictionary )). However, some dictionaries indicate that the word may be considered offensive in all contexts today. For example, (Longman )'s 1995 edition had "''old-fashioned'' an unskilled worker who is paid very low wages, especially in parts of Asia", but the current version adds "''taboo old-fashioned'' a very offensive word ... Do not use this word".〕 particularly in South Africa.〔http://www.news24.com/SouthAfrica/Politics/Malema-under-fire-over-slur-on-Indians-20111020〕
== Etymology ==
The origins of the word are uncertain but it is thought to have originated from the name of a Gujarati sect (the Kolī, who worked as day labourers) or perhaps from the Tamil word for a payment for work, ''kuli'' (). An alternative etymological explanation is that the word came from the Urdu ''qulī'' (, قلی), which itself could be from the Turkish word for slave, ''qul''.〔 The word was used in this sense for labourers from India. In 1727, Dr. Engelbert Kämpfer described "coolies" as dock labourers who would unload Dutch merchant ships at Nagasaki in Japan.
The Chinese word 苦 力 (pinyin: kǔlì) literally means "bitterly hard (use of) strength", occasionally translated as "bitter labour", in the Mandarin pronunciation.
抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』
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