THE WORD "TARIFF"
A correspondent forwards to "The Post" the following quotation of Edgar Wallace's book "The Man From Morocco," and asks if the statement is correct: "For hundreds of years theso Barbary pirates levied a tax on every ship that passed. Why the word 'tariff' comes from Tarifa, a little village on the other side of the straits." [Wo can find no warrant for Edgar Wallace's statement that the word "tariff" comes from Tarifa, a small town in Spain, on the Straits of Gibraltar through which the Barbary pirates levied a tax on every ship that passed. Works of reference, such as the "Oxford Dictionary," "Webster's Dictionary," and the "Encyclopaedia Britanuica" concur in deriving "tariff" from the Spanish word "tarifa," a list or schedule of prices, the Spanish word in turn coming from the- Arabic "ta'rifa, information, an inventory, from "• 'arf," knowledge.]
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https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers/EP19280915.2.38
Bibliographic details
Evening Post, Volume CVI, Issue 56, 15 September 1928, Page 8
Word Count
143THE WORD "TARIFF" Evening Post, Volume CVI, Issue 56, 15 September 1928, Page 8
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