I heard some time ago that Mahout had a meaning in Hebrew in addition to the normal reading that we started with as the driver of the elephant.
Unfortunately, my Hebrew is non-existent beyond recognizing the letters on a top so I had to find somebody who knows the language to clarify. I have had a few folks promise to send me the correct spelling, but none followed through. Today I finally got a native informant to confirm that mahout in Hebrew or rather (מהות) means "essence" or "true meaning". That seems like a pretty nice tie-in for a data-mining project.
