chouse

"You shall chouse him of Horses, Cloaths, and Mony," wrote John Dryden in his 1663 play Wild Gallant. Dryden was one of the first English writers to use chouse, but he wasn't the last. That term—which may derive from a Turkish word, çavuş, meaning "doorkeeper" or "messenger"—has a rich literary past, appearing in works by Samuel Pepys, Henry Fielding, Sir Walter Scott, and Charles Dickens, among others, but its use dropped off in the 20th century. In fact, English speakers of today may be more familiar with another chouse, a verb used in the American West to mean "to drive or herd roughly." In spite of their identical spellings, the two chouse homographs are not related (and the origin of the latter is unknown).