• boudoir •
Pronunciation: bud-wahr • Hear it!
Part of Speech: Noun
Meaning: A private elegantly furnished sitting room, dressing room, bedroom, where a lady may retire to be alone or to receive her intimate friends.
Notes: This word usually denotes a lady's bedroom but connotes eloquence and intimacy. It has a rarely used adjective, boudoiresque, and an equally rarely used verb, boudoirize "to spend time in or frequent a boudoir". My spellchecker recognizes neither. Remember the O before the U in the first syllable and the French spelling of [war] in the second.
In Play: While you don't have to be rich to have boudoirs, it helps: "When Priscilla's father refused to buy her a third Porsche after she had wrecked two, she hastened to her boudoir and sulked for the rest of the day." Boudoir photography is intimate, sensual, even erotic images of the subject in a private dressing room setting.
Word History: In the past, the upper class French were sophisticated enough to have a room into which their ladies could retire to pout, for boudoir in French is the place noun for bouder "to pout, sulk". We also find bodene "belly, paunch" in the Romance language Walloon. French and Walloon probably borrowed their words from a Germanic language, since there is no trace of an ancestor in Latin. It seems to go back to PIE beu-dh-/bou-dh- "to blow, swell, puff", found in Germanic English bud and German Butzen "bulge, lump". Grandwords of beu-bh-/bou-bh- occur in English bubble, Danish boble "bubble", Dutch bubbel "bubble", and Czech bublina "bubble". (Now let's all thank Grand Panjandrum David Myer of Melbourne, Australia, an active Agoran for 14 years, who submitted today's fascinating Good Word a decade ago. Thank you, too, Slava, for reminding me of it here.)
