sahib

Sahib or Saheb is a term of address originating from Arabic. As a loanword, Sahib has passed into several languages, including Persian, Kurdish, Turkish, Azerbaijani, Kazakh, Uzbek, Turkmen, Tajik, Crimean Tatar, Urdu, Hindi, Punjabi, Pashto, Bengali, Gujarati, Marathi, Rohingya and Somali. During medieval times, it was used either as an official title or an honorific. Now, in South and Central Asia, it is almost exclusively used to give respect to someone higher or lower. The honorific has largely been replaced with sir. In the Tibeto-Burman language of Mizo, it is shortened as sâp, referring to people of European descent.