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A punkah is an old kind of large fan, hung across a room and swung back and forth by hand — often a cloth sheet on a frame, pulled with a rope. You meet the word in writing about colonial India and similar hot places before electric ceiling fans. A person whose job was to pull the rope was sometimes called a punkah-wallah. The word is historical now; in a modern house you would just say fan. English borrowed it from Hindi paṅkhā, 'fan', going back to a word for a wing. Though actually, it is not the little hand fan you fold up, and it is not today's electric 吊扇 even if the job (moving air across a room) is the same. who only know 'fan' can picture a big swinging cloth, worked by a person, in a time before switches.
布風扇（舊時南亞等地用繩拉動的室內大扇）
組成Borrowed from Hindi पंखा (paṅkhā, fan), from Sanskrit पक्षक (pakṣaka), from पक्ष (pakṣa, wing).
原始詞典資料1 筆記錄
以下是外部詞典記錄的用法，原文照列，我們還沒有寫成教學內容。上面的說明才是我們自己寫的；有些用法可能上面已經講過了。
punkahnoun/ˈpʌŋkə/
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A fan, particularly a large fan made of leaf or cloth and hung from the ceiling, (historical) formerly often operated by a servant.
- A punkah is, by some, used instead of a chattah, (or umbrella); but it is very inferior as a defence against either sun, wind, or rain.
- Outside the court the sun blazed—within was the wind of great punkahs that made you shiver …
資料來源：英文維基詞典 English Wiktionary（CC BY-SA 4.0）。 原文照列，未經改寫。