morocco

Morocco is a soft goatskin leather used especially in bookbinding, and its name points to the country from which the leather was originally imported. English Morocco, the country name, is an anglicisation of Spanish Marruecos, derived from the city name Marrakesh. The city’s ancient Berber name was amūr n Yakuš, “land/country of God”; the source also gives Berber Tāmurākušt as the name under which Marrakesh was established during the Almoravid dynasty. The leather term followed the country name, not the other way around. The word is recorded in Letitia Elizabeth Landon’s novel in a passage dated 1838, where it describes purple cases; a later example from Lawrence Durrell’s Monsieur, published in 1974, describes a green morocco-covered volume. The name also came to be used for sheepskin leather made in imitation of the original, while a separate sense names a very strong ale once brewed in Cumberland.