"I looked it up in my smaller dictionaries and came up empty"
Is there some reason, Hat, why you don't just go to the OED straightaway?

And, more to the point: "smaller dictionaries"? Whatever the hell do you own those for?

I own as many dictionaries as I possibly can. And I like the M-W Collegiate and the American Heritage, so I try to give them a chance to enlighten me before I haul out the big guns. After all, if you only use the OED, how are you ever going to find out how obscure a word is?

While you're reading about Burma, may I recommend The Glass Palace by Amitav Ghosh? It's one of those sprawling historical novels which has been the undoing of many a writer. It's not his best work -- that would be the stunning In an Antique Land, about which I can gush at length, if you like -- but it's not bad. In particular he manages to bring to life some pretty sweeping changes (political, cultural, even ecological) in the colonial and postcolonial periods of one unlucky little country.

Thanks -- I like Ghosh's writing (I've got Antique Land), so I'll look for it.