Al-Nokhadha

The word

Al-Nokhadha (al-nōkhadha, also written nōkhidha and nākhudhā) is, in the usage of the Gulf, the master of a ship: the man who commands the vessel and its crew and answers for the voyage. The word is a loan. It is generally held to come from Persian nākhudā, the ship's master, and to have entered the Arabic of the coast in that sense. Lisān al-ʿArab does not record it, nor do the other classical works this reference cites, and there is no Arabic root to set out. This page therefore gives the word's sense as the Gulf used it and goes no further.

The classical words beside it

The classical language had its own word for a seaman: Lisān gives al-mallāḥ, the seaman, named from the salt water (al-milḥ) he keeps to. The nōkhadha was not in a different trade from the mallāḥ, but in a different place aboard — the one who commanded where the others worked. A family called al-Nokhadha and a family called al-Mallāḥ need share nothing, but the two names describe the same deck; and neither is al-ghawwāṣ, who went over its side.

Bearing the name

A family name of this kind records what an ancestor did — here, that he commanded a boat — as the name was applied to him; it is not a lineage, and it confers no rank or command on anyone bearing it today. It attaches to no tribe, and two families bearing it need have no connection to one another beyond the word itself.