• kaffle

From Arabic ???????? ( q?fila , “ caravan ” ) . Doublet of cafila .

• ( Received Pronunciation ) IPA ^{( key )} : /?k?fl?/
• ( US ) IPA ^{( key )} : /?k?fl?/
• ( cot ? caught merger ) IPA ^{( key )} : /?k?fl?/

• Audio ( General Australian ) :

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• Audio ( US ) :

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coffle ( plural coffles )

1. A line of people or animals fastened together, especially a chain of prisoners or slaves .
   • 1816 , Mungo Park , Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa :

     The people of the coffle spent the day in drying such articles as were wet, and in cleaning ten pairs of ornamented pistols with shea-butter.

   • 1892 , Walt Whitman, “ Song of Myself ”, in Leaves of Grass   [ … ] , Philadelphia, Pa.: David McKay, publisher ,   [ … ] , →OCLC :

     I hear the wheeze of the slave- coffle , as the slaves march on, as the husky gangs pass on by twos and threes, fastened together with wrist-chains and ankle-chains,

   • 1982 , TC Boyle , Water Music , Penguin, published 2006 , page 173 :

     If the explorer could make Kamalia he might be able to hook up with a slave coffle heading for the coast.

   • 1997 [ 1990 ], David Foster Wallace , “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction”, in A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments , Boston, Mass.: Little, Brown and Company , →ISBN :

     Once all experience is finally reduced to marketable image, once the receiving user of user-friendly receivers can break from the coffle and choose freely, Americanly, from an Americanly infinite variety of moving images hardly distinguishable from real-life images [ … ]

   • 2000 , George R.R. Martin , A Storm of Swords , Bantam, published 2011 , page 323 :

     Her litter came to a sudden halt at the cross street, to allow a coffle of slaves to shuffle across her path, urged along by the crack of an overseer's lash.

   • 2011 February 18, Susan Eva O'Donovan, “William Webb's World”, in New York Times ‎ ^[1] :

     It dominated late-night dinner conversation; it traveled along with marching columns of chained slaves, the infamous coffle lines that remain the iconic face of the domestic slave trade.

coffle ( third-person singular simple present coffles , present participle coffling , simple past and past participle coffled )

1. ( transitive ) To fasten (a line of people or animals) together.

• Coffel