Plural of godown; warehouses or storage buildings, especially those used in Asia for storing goods or merchandise.
From Portuguese 'godão' (warehouse), adopted into English via the East India trade. Derived from Tamil 'kuttagu' (corner room). The term traveled along trade routes from Asia to Europe.
Godowns are a linguistic fossil of colonial trade—the word traveled from South Asia through Portuguese traders and into English, encoding the specific architecture of monsoon-region warehouses that British traders encountered.
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