If you marry someone from another state and start to “keep house” as they used to say, you might find you have different words for some common household items. One of them would be that piece of furniture in your bedroom with drawers for your clothes. My grandmother from New Jersey called it a “chest of drawers,” and many people still use that today. This was sometimes heard as the “chester drawers” which became simply the “chester,” as if someone of that name had invented it in a fit of pique at having clothes constantly lying around.
More commonly it’s a “dresser,” but I don’t call it that. For me, that’s too close to a “dressing table,” where ladies sit in front of a mirror, surrounded by jewelry boxes and cosmetics. Dressers go way back to the early days of New England; however, you wouldn’t find them in the bedroom, but in the kitchen, functioning as countertops with drawers underneath to store items related to food preparation. We owe this word to the French, where “dresser” as a verb means “prepare.” Later on, dressers moved into the dining room, serving as what are presently known as “sideboards.” This meaning of “dresser” was considered old-fashioned even in the 1930s and is now largely forgotten. Today the dresser’s travels are over. It stands solidly in the bedroom, full of socks and pants instead of silverware and placemats.
But I call it a “bureau,” and if your spouse were of the dresser faction, they might argue that “bureau” should be reserved for an “office,” as in the Federal Bureau of Investigation. This comes to us directly from the French word for “office,” both in the sense of “department” and “a place of business.” In French, a bureau is also a desk, and it is in this meaning that the word made its way into early America. Sometimes these bureaus had drawers underneath, and as the writing aspect was eventually lost, the whole piece of furniture morphed into the bedroom bureau we have today.
There is another word that was used in the old days for a chest of drawers: the “commode,” which is still the French word, derived from the original meaning “convenient.” It was more convenient to have clothes in drawers than in the deep trunks they used earlier. Today in the U.S., this term for a chest of drawers has been sidelined by a more modern, plastic “commode,” the one that’s nearby for those who don’t get around so well anymore and need something more “convenient” for some important aspects of their lives. This change began in England, where a “bedside commode” (nightstand) came into being in the mid-19th century, with a liftable top to reveal a dry sink that could hold a basin of water, and a large cupboard beneath to hold a chamber pot. A variation was a chair with an opening in the seat, a ceramic pot beneath it. “Commode” could refer to either the nightstand/washstand or to the pot itself. When the newfangled water-closet entered the picture, it was an easy transfer for the word “commode” to both the room and the water-fed wonder inside it. Today this dual usage remains in much of the South, to the surprise of many a Northerner, nonplussed by a southern visitor’s “Could I use your commode?” It’s easy to imagine that a proper Christian household would like to avoid any confusion between the various meanings of “commode,” so its application to wooden furniture died out except in the mouths of antique dealers.
If we want to get really fancy, there is one more word for a chest of drawers – the “chiffonier,” its Frenchiness conjuring an elegant image of a brass-handled antique in our minds. In the French-speaking world today, it is indeed where you might keep your clothes, but it started as a place to keep your “chiffons” – scraps of cloth or rags, a place for your odds and ends, and could also refer to the ragman himself who collected old clothes for resale or for rugs.
We can’t leave this subject without mentioning the key part of a bureau – its drawers. My father always called them “draws,” and he was not alone. This pronunciation comes from the Atlantic Seaboard, where the final R was lost at the time of colonization, making “drawer” equal to “draw.” Today, “draw” can be found all along the Atlantic Coast (except near Philadelphia, where they never lost their Rs) and westward. Far from the coast, the descendants of these emigrants ended up with a good solid R at the ends of words, except, often, in the case of “drawer.” Why it is an exception is a mystery. As my professor used to say, “A good topic for a research paper.”
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.
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