An alternate spelling or transliteration of ankus, referring to the hooked stick used by elephant handlers in South Asia to guide and direct elephants.
An alternative romanization of the Hindi/Sanskrit "ānkus" or "aṅkuśa." Different transliteration systems from Hindi to English produced multiple variant spellings (ankus, ankush, ankusha) that all refer to the same tool.
The existence of multiple spellings for the same word shows how messy it is to convert sounds from one language's alphabet to another—there's no single 'correct' way to write Hindi words in English letters, so dictionaries end up listing variants.
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