กองเป็นภูเขาเลากา

[DavidHouston]

Lexitron has the following phrases: กองเป็นภูเขาเลากา and กองพะเนินเทินทึก to mean "pile up; pile on; heap up".

"๒๐๐๐ อุปมาอุปไมย" has the phrase "กองเป็นภูเขาเลากา" to mean "สุมกันเป็นกองมากมาย"

Does anyone know what the element "เลากา" or "ภูเขาเลากา" means?

Thanks.

[BKK2509]

I'm Thai I don't even know what that means?

Pu kao means mountain

Loa ka............... sorry I don't this one. Proably it's a rhym (do I spell it correctly) and it doesn't mean anything.

Sue,London

[Rikker]

As mentioned, it's a euphonic rhyming element with no direct meaning, คำคล้องจอง as they're called.

It's still an interesting question where it comes from, but in Googling around I found a couple of instances from Thais also asking the literal meaning of เลากา, and they got no answers on the etymology there, either.

Presumably at the time of its coining, whenever that was, the เลากา part would have been familiar to speakers. Often in rhyming expressions you get one irrelevant or meaningless syllable, as in หมูเห็ดเป็ดไก่ "(many kinds of) meat", where เห็ด's only purpose is to rhyme--mushrooms are irrelevant (except perhaps to maintain a broad food theme). But it's unlikely that you would have both of the last two syllables be meaningless. They've got to have some origin, naturally.

If I had to guess, I'd say เลากา sounds a bit like the name of a particular mountain somewhere. Alternately, it might be a foreign word, and it existed as a loanword in Thai before eventually going obsolete--perhaps meaning "mountain" or similar. But I have no specific evidence to back these guesses up. These are just possibilities based on observable patterns in other four-syllable rhyming phrases.