Parlor might sound like an old-fashioned word to many of us…and I daresay we all think of the same thing when we hear it: a formal sort of living room in a Victorian house. Right?

That is certainly what the word has meant for much of its history, beginning as early as the 1500s. But before that, the word has a rather interesting history.

It traces its roots to the French word parler, which means “to speak.” If you’re like me, a lightbulb goes on in your head the second you make that connection. Because, of course! A parlor is a room where you sit and talk to people! The earliest use of the word for a room, however, was the French parleor, which was a courtroom or auditorium, back in Old French. 

When it traveled across the Channel to join the English language around the year 1200, it was used to refer not to a room but to the window through which confessions were made in a church. By 1300, it was used to refer to an apartment in a monastery where the monks could have conversations with people from the outside.

By the late 1300s, parlor became a room in a house rather than having religious connotations, and at first it was for “a room off a main hall offering privacy.” Then by the early 1400s, it was used as “a public room of a private house” (so a receiving room). Then it shifted to be a sitting room for the family.

Fast-forward to the 1880s, and it was being used to refer to a showroom for a business, like an ice cream parlor.

A few weeks ago, my husband and I were discussing words used for rooms or spaces that made no sense to us, and I brought up arcade. The only time I’ve really encountered this word “live,” so to speak, is in a video game arcade. So when I was researching Paris for The Collector of Burned Books and realized that an area of posh flats above the Champs-Elysee are also called “The Arcades,” I knew there had to be a meaning of this word that I didn’t know.

The word arcade has the hint of its root meaning right there in the word: arc, or arch. It’s from the Latin arcus, which then was used in the Italian arcata for an “arch of a bridge.” The French borrowed the word from there, using it to describe a vaulted space (hence those high-end apartments).

English adopted the word in 1731 with that same meaning and took to applying it to the spaces or passages formed by a succession of arches–think avenues of trees or a space beneath piers or pillars. By the late 1700s, it was used to refer to the spaces under a covered avenue that was lined with shops…and amusements. That’s ultimately where arcade games comes from, though that particular phrase dates only to 1977.

Ready to continue our series on flowers? Today we’re going to look at the word lily.

Lily is a very OLD word. As in, our English word goes all the way back into Old English with various spellings, and it traces its roots not only to Latin and Greek but even further back. Our spelling is taken from Latin, but pretty much every Western language has a similar word from either Latin or Greek, all meaning the same thing. The flower, and also its other associations with “white, pure, lovely.” The universality of the word is probably due to its inclusion in biblical texts.

Lily of the valley is a direct translation of the Hebrew in Song of Solomon, though it was first applied to the plant we think of today only in the 1500s. Interestingly, lily pad is an Americanism, dating from 1834 (I didn’t realize it was so specific!).

Ready to continue our series on flowers? Today we’re going to look at the word lavender.

Did you know that lavender is part of the mint family? I am clearly not well-educated on botany, LOL–that was news to me. The word lavender, given to said plant, is from the 1300s, taken directly from French, which was in turn from Latin. The Latin root seems to have some commonality with lividus, which means “bluish” as well as “livid,” but it also has similarities to lavare, “to wash.” Lavender has been used in washing and perfumes for millennia, so it’s likely no accident that the root words are so similar.

I don’t know about you, but I always wonder which came first with words like lavender, the plant or the color-name. Sometimes, with things like orange, the color was actually first! But definitely not so with lavender. The word for the plant predates the word for the light-purple color by about 300 years, with the color-word popping up around 1840 as an adjective (as in “lavender flowers”) and as a noun all on its own by 1882.

Ready to continue our series on flowers? Today, we’re going to look at the word pansy.

The word pansy dates from the 1400s, given as a name to a type of violet (okay, first, I didn’t realize pansies were in the violet family–I’ve already learned something!). Now…where did the word come from?

The second thing I’ve just learned! It’s from the French penser, which means “to think.” Okay, um…why?

Well, we probably all know that flowers have traditional meanings, and this one was apparently associated with remembrance, given to someone to let them know you were thinking about them. I love that. Handing someone a pansy would literally be, in French, handing them a thought.

Of course, if you hear pansy today, you might not think of a flower; you might think of “an effeminate man.” That meaning joined the English language in 1929. We can guess as to why calling a man a flower–something delicate and feminine, traditionally–carried that meaning, but there’s no clear history as to why pansy became the word of choice, rather than rose or violet or any other flower.

Ready to continue our series on flowers? Today, we’re going to look at the word carnation.

The word dates from around 1530s, though etymologists aren’t entirely sure where it came from. Their best guesses are that it’s a variant of coronation, either because the flower looks a bit like a crown or because it was frequently used to make flower-crowns…or perhaps it’s instead based on its traditional pink color. In French, carnation means “complexion,” a variation of the Italian carnagione, which means “flesh colored.” The Italian comes, in turn, from the Latin carnationem, ultimately from caro, meaning “flesh.”

That’s quite a trail of petals to follow back…but the Oxford English Dictionary casts doubt on it with one simple fact: not all carnations are pink and hence “skin colored.” 😉

But whether or not it is the first history of the English word, we can’t deny that it is a history of it–some of the first recorded uses of carnation are most definitely concerning human flesh, in a very particular way: the incarnation (taking on of flesh) of Christ.

I don’t know about you, but I’d never drawn a connection between the flower and the word incarnation!