I was reading this random blog the other day (cause that's what I do), and in it I read some guy had named his cat "Bezoar". I thought," What a cool, unusual name. Wonder where it's from?" So, having the vast inertnet at my very fingertips, went searching....

"The bezoar is a hard ball of hair or vegetable fibre that occurs in the stomachs of cud-chewing animals such as goats (though humans get them, too). If you feel like categorising them, a trichobezoar is a hairball, while a phytobezoar is one that contains mostly vegetable fibres.

The word is Persian (pad-zahr, counter-poison or antidote) and the bezoar’s fame as a cure for poison spread westwards from there in medieval times. You swallowed it, or occasionally rubbed it on the infected part. In A Voyage to Abyssinia, written by Father Lobo in the eighteenth century, he says: “I had recourse to bezoar, a sovereign remedy against these poisons, which I always carried about me”. Belief in its near-magical properties was then common."

It means, "Hairball". Clever.