winkel, noun

/ˈvəŋk(ə)l//ˈwɪŋk(ə)l/
Forms:
Also winkle.
Origin:
DutchShow more Dutch, shop.
a. general dealer sense 1 b. b. In historical contexts. rare. A travelling store. Also attributive, and occasionally figurative.
1827 G. Thompson Trav. 61The village contains a couple of small retail shops, or winkels as they are called.
1832 Graham’s Town Jrnl 28 Sept. 153It is mortifying to compare the degree of commercial enterprize of our currency colonists with that of the same class in New South Wales, the sons of the scamps who were sent there 140 years after Riebeek opened Jan Compagnie’s winkel at the Cape!
1839 W.C. Harris Wild Sports 331We lost not a moment in opening a winkel, or shop.
1855 N.J. Merriman Cape Jrnls (1957) 221Kreli himself was absent having gone..to settle a dispute between two English or Scotch traders..as to which had the prior right to the winkel or shop.
1878 T.J. Lucas Camp Life & Sport 211The wooden stores, or ‘Winkels,’ belonging to the general merchants.
1882 C. Du Val With Show through Sn Afr. I. 185We would get to a ‘winkel’ (shop) about an hour and a half from the town.
1897 E. Glanville in E.R. Seary S. Afr. Short Stories (1947) 20We were talking about snakes at the little roadside winkle — a composite shop, where you could buy moist black sugar, tinned butter, imported; tinned milk, also imported; cotton, prints, boots, ‘square face’, tobacco, dates, nails, gunpowder, cans, ribbons, tallow candles, and the Family Herald.
1908 Cape 28 Feb. 15At the door to the winkel the proprietor stands in his shirt-sleeves.
1926 P. Smith Beadle (1929) 14He had built for himself and his grandmother the little ‘winkel’ in which they now lived. Here they sold prints and calicoes, bags of coffee-beans, rice, sugar, salt, spades and buckets, cooking-pots, kettles, gridirons, combs and mouth-organs, sweets, snuff and many patent medicines.
1937 C.R. Prance Tante Rebella’s Saga 22It was fully forty miles from one backveld ‘winkel’ to the next, where one can buy tinned milk with sardines and ‘bully-beef’ and perhaps some Home-Remedies warranted to cure everything except sudden death.
1942 S. Cloete Hill of Doves 7It would be wonderful to have real shoes from the winkel.
1960 G. Lister Reminisc. 4There were no bakers near us, and only one little winkel, as the shop was called. There one could buy almost anything from a needle to a plough.
1973 Sunday Times 14 Oct. (Mag. Sect.) 3When I went into a dorp winkel..did I throw hysterics because the woman in the shop could not speak a word of English?
[1990 Weekend Post 17 Mar. (Leisure) 3‘Go and hear there by Venter se winkel if they got any culture,’ shouted the ever-obliging Marie.]
1990 R. Gool Cape Town Coolie 30He entered the tea-room, really an old-fashioned winkel.
A travelling store. Also attributive, and occasionally figurative.
Derivatives:
Hence winkler noun [English agential suffix -er], a shop-keeper; winkelier.
1840 Echo 22 June 8A person from the country placed his son with a winkler, not a hundred miles from Graham’s Town...A lady came into the store.
1855 W.R. King Campaigning in Kaffirland 138‘Winkel waggons’ had come out to the camp, and the ‘winklers,’ or private traders, sold everything they had.
1871 J. McKay Reminisc. 21Grabbing men called winklers, were charging one shilling per pound for meat, flour, sugar, salt, and similar necessaries.
1900 B. Mitford Aletta 183It was all very well twenty years ago..to call him Oom Paul. But now the old man is rather sick of it. Only think, every dirty little Jew ‘winkler’ calling him ‘Oom’.
1911 L. Cohen Reminisc. of Kimberley 213He hurried back to the Boer winkler in a rage, and said: ‘What do you mean? In your blessed barrel there are pebbles at the bottom, and coffee on the top.’
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18271990

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winkler

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wing, nounn.winkelhaak, noun, passing into adjectiven., adj.
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