from Malay
This word originated in Malaysia
European travelers sometimes encountered less than friendly people. Among the Malays of southeast Asia, according to an English translation in 1518 of a book by the Portuguese Duarte Barbosa, there are people called "Amuco," who "go out into the streets, and kill as many persons as they meet." Sometimes, it appears, the Amuco were soldiers. Another Portuguese account, translated in 1663, says that "all those which were able to bear arms should make themselves Amoucos, that is to say, men resolved either to dye, or vanquish." Captain Cook, in his account of his voyages in the 1770s, offers that "To run amock is to get drunk with opium ... to sally forth from the house, kill the person or persons supposed to have injured the Amock, and any other person that attempts to impede his passage."
Although the English first recorded "running amok" as a trait of the Malay temperament, they readily noticed that it could apply to more familiar instances of murderous frenzy. So before the 1600s were over, "run amok" could refer to an English-speaking madman as well as a Malay one. In the nineteenth century, the writer of The Mind in Lower Animals identified "running amok" as "a peculiar form of human insanity."
Our century has defined amok as a psychological state of unprovoked, extremely destructive behavior followed by amnesia, exhaustion, or even suicide. In the 1980s and 1990s Amok was also a fitting name for a Los Angeles bookstore and press that published a "Sourcebook of the Extremes of Information in Print," including The Sniper's Handbook and The Color Atlas of Oral Cancers.
The Malay language is spoken by more than seventeen million people in present-day Malaysia. Some sixty words from Malay have become significant additions to the English vocabulary, including foods, plants, animals, and fabrics: ketchup (1690), agar (1889), bamboo (1586), rattan (1660), cockatoo (1634), gecko (1774), orangutan (1691, meaning man of the forest), cootie (1917), gingham (1615), sarong 1830, [rice] paddy (1623), and caddy (1792, a container).
