muurkas, noun

/ˈmyːrkas/
Forms:
Also meerkus.
Plurals:
muurkaste/ˈmyːrkastə/, occasionally muurkases.
Origin:
AfrikaansShow more Afrikaans, muur wall + kas (plural kaste) cupboard.
Especially in traditional Cape Dutch houses: a cupboard built into an interior wall. Also muurkassie [see -ie]. See also kas sense 1.
1949 L.G. Green In Land of Afternoon 198The reception room, with its stinkwood muurkas and pieces of Delft.
1963 R. Lewcock Early 19th C. Archit. 344Where eighteenth-century furniture was often built-in (the ‘muurkassie’) or at least kept small and neat (the Georgian book-case) the new furniture was heavy and dominant.
1964 J. Meintjes Manor House 66In the long dining room there were two muurkaste or built-in cabinets in black stinkwood with gabled tops.
1965 M.G. Atmore Cape Furn. 201Wall Cupboards or Cabinets (muurkaste).
1972 S. Afr. Garden & Home Feb.–Mar. 57The living-room..has wall cupboards of the Cape Dutch Muurkas type, filled with hand-painted crockery.
1975 Cape Times 7 Jan. 8This year closed with the same auctioneers selling a fine example of an 18th-century Cape stinkwood-framed ‘Muurkas’, bought for R5500 for ‘Nova Constantia’ a historic house in the Constantia valley.
1981 J. Kench Cape Dutch Homesteads 44The stinkwood ‘muurkas’ to the right of the screen door is thought to have belonged to Huysing himself.
1981 J. Kench Cape Dutch Homesteads 51In the agterkamer the bricked outlines of two alcoves, now visible in the finished house, were discovered. These housed the traditional muurkaste — wall cupboards — which were a feature of Cape Dutch homes.
1985 Style Dec. 193Young Cape Wine Farmers are..forever throwing open wildly old houses full of meerkuses and wakuses and wildly old bottles of wine grown on the estate.
1987 G. Viney Col. Houses 40Behind the voorhuys was the galdery with two wall cupboards (muurkaste).
a cupboard built into an interior wall. Also muurkassie [see -ie].
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Afrikaans
mutsha, nounn.mzala, nounn.
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