shikar

From Urdu شکار / Hindi शिकार (śikār), from Persian شکار (šekâr).

• IPA^(key): /ʃɪˈkɑː/

shikar (countable and uncountable, plural shikars)

1. (India) Hunting, sport; a hunting expedition.
   • 1888, Rudyard Kipling, “Miss Youghal's Sais”, in Plain Tales from the Hills, Folio Society, published 2007, page 25:

     Where other men took ten days to the Hills, Strickland took leave for what he called shikar, put on the disguise that appealed to him at the time, stepped down into the brown crowd, and was swallowed up for a while.

   • 1924, EM Forster, A Passage to India, Penguin, published 2005, page 130:

     They climbed up the ladder, and he mounted shikar fashion, treading first on the sharp edge of the heel and then into the looped-up tail.

2. A hunt.
   • 1954, Jim Corbett, The Temple Tiger and More Man-eaters of Kumaon, Oxford: Oxford University Press, published 1988, page 1:

     With us we had fifteen of the keenest and most cheerful hillman I have ever been associated with on a shikar.

3. Alternative form of shikari (“a hunter or tracker”)
   • 1855, [Michael] Rafter, chapter XVI, in Percy Blake; or, The Young Rifleman, volume III, London: Hurst and Blackett, page 249:

     I became an immense favourite with the simple inhabitants of the country, who called me the Burra Feringhee Shikar, or great European hunter[.]

• shikari

shikar (third-person singular simple present shikars, present participle shikaring or shikarring, simple past and past participle shikared or shikarred)

1. (India, dated, ambitransitive) To hunt; to go hunting.
   • 1893, Rudyard Kipling, “In the Rukh”, in Many Inventions, London: Macmillan and Co., page 198:

     ‘I wish I could have made him a gun-boy. There's no fun in shikarring alone, and this fellow would have been a perfect shikarri. I wonder what in the world he is.’

• Harkis, Kishar, Sakhir, Shakir, Shirak, rakhis, rakish, riksha, shikra