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• etagere •

Pronunciation: e-tah-zher • Hear it!

Part of Speech: Noun

Meaning: A piece of furniture or tableware with a stack or stacks of open shelves, trays, or plates.

Notes: If you like, you may decorate this word like this: étagère. This word was borrowed from French so recently (mid 1800s), the French spelling is still preferred in some quarters. Perhaps it is this spelling that has prevented it from developing a derivational family; it is a lexical orphan.



In Play: This word is usually used to refer to furniture with decorative shelving or bookcases: "Clay Potter used the etagere inherited from his mother to display his ceramic creations." However, it can refer to any shelving like arrangement: "Lydia Potts serves afternoon tea with two étagères: one for savories and one for sweets."



Word History: Today's Good Word, as we have already seen, was recently grabbed from French étagère "shelf", from Old French estage "shelf, story, floor, residence", a revision of Vulgar (Street) Latin staticum, itself a revision of Latin statio(n) "standing (still); station, post, residence". The Romance languages didn't like words beginning on S+consonant. The French solution was to add an initial E to these words. English borrowed its station from the Latin word and also the French rendition of it. Statio(n) was made from PIE sta- "to stand (still), be stationary but firm", found in Sanskrit tisthati "stand, stay, abide", Greek statos "placed, standing", Latin stare "to stand", Welsh stondin "stall, stand, booth", Irish stad and stagh "to stay", Polish stać "to stand", Russian stoyat' "to stand", Serbian stajati "to stand", Dutch staan "to stand", German stehen "to stand", and English stand. (Thanks is now due newcomer Mary Ann Wilson for sharing today's lovely Good Word, which has barely begun to shake off its French origin.)

Would putting the decoration on the first letter alter the pronunciation to 'ay'? I took 4 years of French in high school, but that was a couple of years back, and I never used it either.

And presumably English 'stage' (which it very closely resembles) is also directly related?

Correct. At some point in the semantic development from Latin to Old French, before the initial E was added, statio(n) meant "where you stand, floor", hence "stage".

"Stage" would be a good word to explicate. It can be a verb with at least two senses (stage a play, stage packages for delivery), and as a noun, it can also mean a stage in the progression of a disease. Maybe more.