Bizarre, Bazaar
These words are pronounced nearly identically in English, and their meanings may seem related, but they are from completely different sources.
Bazaar’s origin is the less bizarre of the two. In the late 1500’s English got it from Italian bazarra, which itself was borrowed from Persian bazar. Bazar is descended from Middle Persian baha-char, “place of prices”.
Bizarre, meanwhile, is from Basque, a language spoken in southern France and northern Spanish which is unrelated to any other language in Europe. In Basque, bizar means “beard”; and it was borrowed by Spanish as bizarro, meaning “brave”. From there it apparently came into French as bizarre, “handsome, brave, foreign”, and this latter meaning was picked up when English adopted the word in the middle of the 1600’s.
Both words indicate something that makes a sudden, strong, bright, flashy impression. It is interesting that bazaar has the same first syllable as busy and business.
