pondok, noun
- Forms:
- Show more Also bondhoek, pandok, pondhock, pondhok, pondoek, pontok.
- Plurals:
- pondoks, or (formerly) pondokken.
- Origin:
- Afrikaans, MalayShow more Afrikaans (also pandok), from Malay pondok hut, shed; school and lodgings for students of religion.
- Note:
- The word was used in Cape Town, at the beginning of the 19th century, of the reed huts occupied by slaves in the gardens of slave-masters’ properties. The word occurs frequently in the records of the Court of Justice from this period, and moved into South African Dutch and South African English usage. (In modern Malaysia the pondok is a rural, resident, Islamic educational institution, conducted in reed huts.)
A rough shelter, usually a crude hut or shanty made of scraps of wood, cardboard, corrugated iron, etc.; loosely (often jokingly), a small house; pondokkie sense 1.
1815 A. Plumptre tr. of H. Lichtenstein’s Trav. in Sn Afr. (1930) II. 185Near it stand six or eight pandokken, as they are called, a kind of huts made of reeds woven into a wooden frame, which are inhabited by the principal Bastard-Hottentots.
1990 C. Laffeaty Far Forbidden Plains 88As they approached the farmhouse she saw that it was little more than a pondok built of wattle-and-daub, roofed with zinc.
A rough shelter, usually a crude hut or shanty made of scraps of wood, cardboard, corrugated iron, etc.; loosely (often jokingly), a small house; pondokkie sense 1.
Visualise Quotations
Quotation summarySenses
Copyright © 2023 Dictionary Unit for South African English.