Shagreen
Archive
Week fifty-one: SHAGREEN (probability 5856), by David Sutton
SHAGREEN is a granular leather made from horses' or donkeys' skin; the word is also used for the skin of a shark, ray, etc, that is covered with small nodules. The word comes ultimately form the Turkish sagri, horse's rump.
The vocabulary of leather is a rich one. Here are some other terms of types of leather:
| CABRETTA | a soft leather made from the skins of a hairy S. American sheep |
| CAPESKIN | a type of soft leather made from the skins of long-haired sheep or lambs |
| CHEVEREL, CHEVERIL | a soft, flexible kidskin leather |
| CHEVRETTE | a thin kind of goatskin |
| CORDOVAN, CORDWAIN | goatskin leather, originally from Cordova in Spain |
| DONGOLA | a type of leather from Dongola, a small town on the Nile |
| MAROQUIN | goat leather, morocco leather |
| MOROCCO | a fine goatskin leather tanned with sumac |
| NAPA, NAPPA | a soft leather made (originally at Napa in California) by a special tawing process, from sheepskin or goatskin |
| NUBUCK | a type of leather with a velvety finish |
| RUSSIA | a type of leather originally from Russia |
| SAFFIAN | leather tanned with sumac and dyed in bright colours |
| SLINKSKIN | leather made from the skin of a slink, or prematurely born calf |
| YUFT | another name for russia leather |
Finally, for the really ambitious player, we have CHECKLATON (also spelt SHECKLATON or SCHECKLATON), which is a Spenserian word apparently denoting a kind of gilded leather used for making embroidered jacks, a jack in this sense being a defensive leather coat and a JACKMAN, a name of some renown in Scrabble circles, being a soldier who wore such a coat.