An archaic or obsolete verb meaning to scratch, scrape, or irritate; rarely found in modern English.
Possibly derived from Latin 'cassare' or related to 'scratch' and similar onomatopoetic terms. The word appears sporadically in Middle English texts with unclear etymology, possibly from Italian or Mediterranean language sources.
Cassare is the kind of forgotten verb that linguists treasure because it had very specific meaning—it probably evoked the sound of scratching, but once other scratch-words like 'scrape' and 'irritate' became standardized, cassare just faded from use.
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