Spanish halagar, Old Spanish falagar 'to wheedle,' along with Catalan afalagar, Portuguese afagar, having the same meaning, is referred by Meyer-Lübke to Arabic halaka, defined as 'glatt machen'; but since this Arabic word, spelled with hha (h), not cha (h), means 'to shave (the head, etc.),' the etymology stated by Meyer-Lübke is evidently erroneous. Lokotsch derives the Romance group from the intensive form of kalaka 'to create'; that is, ⨿laka, defined as meaning ‘schön formen, glatt machen, Lügen erfinden’; but if the etymon contained a double l, it would have remained as ll in Spanish, as Baist long ago pointed out. Baist himself met this difficulty by assuming that the first stem of ⨿aka, meaning normally 'to create,' must also have had the sense of the intensive stem, which, he says, was used in Spain meaning 'to beguile.' A more satisfactory starting-point, avoiding both phonetic difficulty and problematic definition, is the third stem of halaka 'to create'; that is, hālaka, ‘to treat (a person) kindly.‘ The slight semantic shift envolved obviously presents no difficulty.