coolie:
(also ‘cooly’; plural: ‘coolies‘; pronunciation: the letter ‘c’ is said with a ‘k’ sound, and the letters ‘coo’ rhyme with the letter ‘coo’ in “cool” and the letters ‘lie’ rhyme with the word “lee”, but not with “lie” — for the right pronunciation of this word, please click here)
Coolies
(in Asia) an unskilled worker; a porter; a labourer;
(old usage) a person from India living South Africa;
(in the USA & in the past) a Chinese worker/labourer in the States,
a railway coolie/porter
In some parts of Asia, a porter who is hired to carry passengers’ luggage at a bus or railway station is called a coolie.
There are thousands of immigrant building coolies from Bangladesh working in the border towns with India illegally and both the governments find it difficult to solve this problem.
Mahatma Gandhi first started his fast for the betterment of all the Indians in general and coolies in particular in South Africa.
