1734, Caaba, cube-shaped building in the Great Mosque of Mecca, containing the Black Stone, the most sacred site of Islam, from Arabic ka'bah "square house," from ka'b "cube."

see cabbala.

1896, from Japanese, popular theater (as opposed to shadow puppet-plays or lyrical Noh dramas).

Kabuki comes from the verb 'kabuku', meaning 'to deviate from the normal manners and customs, to do something absurd.' Today kabuki is performed only by men, but the first kabuki performance was given in about 1603 by a girl, a shrine maiden of Kyoto named O-kuni, who 'deviated from the normal customs' by dressing as a man and entertaining the public with satirical dances in the grounds of the Kitano shrine. [Toshie M. Evans, "A Dictionary of Japanese Loanwords," 1997]

Alternative etymology [Barnhart, OED] is that it means literally "art of song and dance," from ka "song" + bu "dance" + ki "art, skill."

"Berber of Algeria and Tunisia," 1738, also their language (1882), from French, from Arabic qaba'il, plural of qabilah "tribe, horde."

doxology of the Jewish ritual, 1610s, from Aramaic (Semitic) qaddish "holy, holy one," from stem of q'dhash "was holy," ithqaddash "was sanctified," related to Hebrew qadhash "was holy," qadhosh "holy." According to Klein, the name probably is from the second word of the text veyithqaddash "and sanctified be."

"gossip over cups of coffee," 1877, from German Kaffeeklatsch, from kaffee "coffee" (see coffee) + klatsch "gossip" (see klatsch).

THE living-room in a German household always contains a large sofa at one side of the room, which is the seat of honor accorded a guest. At a Kaffeeklatsch (literally, coffee gossip) the guests of honor are seated on this sofa, and the large round table is wheeled up before them. The other guests seat themselves in chairs about the table. [Mary Alden Hopkins, "A 'Kaffeeklatsch,'" "Boston Cooking-School Magazine of Culinary Science and Domestic Economics," May 1905]

1790, "infidel," earlier and also caffre (1670s), from Arabic kafir "unbeliever, infidel, impious wretch," with a literal sense of "one who does not admit (the blessings of God)," from kafara "to cover up, conceal, deny, blot out."

Technically, "a non-Muslim," but in Ottoman times it came to be used there almost exclusively as the disparaging word for "Christian." It also was used by Muslims in East Africa of the pagan black Africans; English missionaries then picked it up as an equivalent of "heathen" to refer to Bantus in South Africa (1731), from which use in English it came generally to mean "South African black" regardless of ethnicity, and to be a term of abuse at least since 1934.

also keffieh, keffiyeh, small shawl or scarf worn with a cord around the head by some Arab men, 1817.

variant of kerfuffle.

1886, in a report in English by the Hawaiian government, which defines the word as "doctor and sorcerer," from Hawaiian, where it was applied as well to priests and navigators. In surfer slang, "a god of surfing," it is attested from 1962 (but big kahuna in same sense is said to date from 1950s).