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smous

verb

  1. To go about selling goods, as an itinerant peddler.

    historical

    Not only South Africans, White and Black, but fortune hunters from Europe and America, Indian and Chinese labourers and traders, and Jews from the ghettoes (sic) and shtetles of Eastern Europe, who had come to 'smous' […]

Where it comes from

Borrowed from Afrikaans smous or Dutch smous, from a Yiddish word whose precise origin is uncertain. One theory is that it derives from Yiddish משה (moyshe, “Moses”), pronounced moushe in Western Yiddish, from Hebrew מֹשֶׁה (moshé, “Moses”).

Adapted from the Wiktionary entry smous (CC BY-SA 4.0).

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