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14th cent. Old Spanish meaning "rogue." Of unknown origin. Popularly connect with Hebrew taqanah "agreement" (Corominas 1991). As Roberts (2014) explained, tacaño was "a word used in financial operations, and adopted by Christians in a pejor[ative] sense." Romance scholars are more skeptical. "Corominas' philological survey of the spotty record of tacaño ... is as scrupulous as any exacting reader can demand.... But on the positive side he remains completely unconvincing. Between [Old Spanish] tacana 'payment' (whose stress pattern remains problematic), also [Judeo-Spanish] tacaná 'ruling, arrangement' flanked by the verb atacanar (Balkan peninsula), on the one hand, and, on the other Late [Old Spanish] tacaño 'rogue,' 'evildoer' there remains a triple gap: prosodic, semantic-stylistic, and morphological-derivational. If an original Orientalism is at all involved, it qualifies only as a very dubious one." ~ Malkiel, "Dubious, Pseudo-, Hybrid, and Mock-Orientalisms in Romance" (1991)
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