A few weeks ago, I brought to your attention the question of bureau versus dresser versus chest of drawers. This week we go deeper into the world of clothing storage. I remember distinctly the day this world was revealed to me in my grandmother’s kitchen across the road, where I had been drawn by the chance of getting one of the world’s best molasses cookies that always seemed to appear out of her coal-fired oven. Grandma had just been darning socks, and as she cut a sheet of thick, soft cookies into rectangles, she told me to take her sewing basket and put it into the clothespress. I had no idea where that was or what it was. Did it have something to do with ironing clothes? Noticing my confusion, she pointed it out to me – it was nothing more than the closet! The clothes closet in the bedroom, to be exact.
Clothespress is a word that was applied originally to a free-standing piece of furniture, what today we would usually call a “wardrobe.” It was a place to hang clothes and might also have shelves or drawers for folded clothes. In other words, a clothespress was a taller, modified chest of drawers. By the time of a survey in the 1940s, only a few people in New England were using it this way. It appears to have lived longer in parts of the South, often as “the press,” though other kinds of “presses” existed too, like a china press for your dishes.
Its meaning eventually shifted from furniture to a little room for clothes. A 1960s survey found that “clothes closet” was strictly a northeastern word, found in New England and extending into the New England settlement area of upstate New York, northern Pennsylvania, and Ohio. Other words for clothes closet exist as well. Throughout the Northeast, all the way to the Mason-Dixon line and into the Midlands, you might hear both wardrobes and closets called “the clothes cupboard” or simply “the cupboard.” Another word that cropped up in older surveys was the “clothes room,” found especially on the coast of New England. This might have come to us via the Dutch as a direct translation of “kleedkammer.” I suspect many of these words are only a distant memory in New England.
Scattered across the country, especially in parts of the South, you might also find that closets are referred to as “wardrobes,” while most of us reserve that term for a free-standing piece of furniture. This mirrors the situation in Australia and the United Kingdom, where they typically do not have built-in closets, but rather “walk-in wardrobes,” which sounds like the portal to the land of Narnia but is actually nothing more than a walk-in closet, or a dressing room. One hypothesis is that the United Kingdom never adopted the word “closet” because of its earlier undesirable connotations as the “water closet” – the “WC” – which in many places was a tiny room containing only the toilet.
Another word for clothes storage shows up in Louisiana: “armoire.” This is the part of the country home to so many French-derived words. Most of us would conjure up a fancy piece of furniture standing against the wall with arabesques and mirrors from the Rococo, but for those who live at the mouth of the Mississippi, it’s any ordinary wardrobe, and the pronunciation has melted down to “armer.” It comes in several varieties: all shelves or only a hanging space, or a combination of shelves, drawers, and a hanging space. You can also hear “armoire” in New England, along with “chifforobe” /SHIF uh rohb/, which is a combination of French “chiffonier” (chest of drawers) and “wardrobe.” It was invented around 1900 and marketed by Sears-Roebuck all around the country, but turns up especially in the South.
As a side note, borrowing between languages works in both directions. In French a free-standing wardrobe is an “armoire” and a built-in closet is a “placard,” but if it’s a walk-in-closet that becomes a separate dressing area, the French borrowed from the English and call it simply “un dressing.” They seem to love those -ing words, rendering the phrase “to go jogging” as both “faire du jogging” and “faire du footing,” while a parking garage or lot is “un parking.” That’s OK as 40% of our vocabulary is from French, so we owe them.
Dale Coye is a member of the American Dialect Society. He has taught English and the humanities at several universities and worked in area theaters as a dialect coach and director. He grew up on a dairy farm in central New York and now lives in Wilton.