| Description |
Sahib or Saheb (; Arabic: صاحب) is an Arabic title meaning companion. It was historically used for the first caliph Abu Bakr in the Quran.
As a loanword, Sahib has passed into several languages, including Persian, Kurdish, Turkish, Azerbaijani, Kazakh, Uzbek, Turkmen, Tajik, Crimean Tatar, Urdu, Hindi, Punjabi, Pashto, Bengali, Gujarati, Marathi, Rohingya and Somali. During medieval times, it was used as a term of address, either as an official title or an honorific. Now, in South and Central Asia, it is almost exclusively used to give respect to someone higher or lower. For example, drivers are commonly addressed as sahib in South Asia and so on. The honorific has largely been replaced with sir. Some shorten sahib to saab. |
