best parlour

• best-parlour, best parlor, best-parlor

(This etymology is missing or incomplete. Please add to it, or discuss it at the Etymology scriptorium. Particularly: “variant of "guest parlour"?”)

best parlour (plural best parlours)

1. (dated) A parlour or drawing room that is furnished especially well and often reserved for entertaining guests.
   • 1843 December 19, Charles Dickens, “Stave Two. The First of the Three Spirits.”, in A Christmas Carol. In Prose. Being a Ghost Story of Christmas, London: Chapman & Hall, , →OCLC, page 55:

     He then conveyed him and his sister into the veriest old well of a shivering best-parlour that ever was seen, where the maps upon the wall, and the celestial and terrestrial globes in the windows, were waxy with cold.

   • 1891, Laura E[lizabeth Howe] Richards, “The House in the Wood”, in Hildegarde's Holiday: A Sequel to Queen Hildegarde, Boston, M.A.: Estes and Lauriat Publishers, page 215:

     He furnished it beautiful, every room like a best parlor, — carpets and sofys and lace curt'ins, — there was nothing too good.

   • 1916, Mrs. [Mary Louisa] Molesworth, “Chapter I”, in Edmeé: a Tale of the French Revolution, Macmillan and Co., Limited, page 8:

     For it was not by any means every farmhouse that had a best parlour at all, and none possessed one as pretty as that of Madame Marcel, the farmer's wife.

   • 1925, Stanley Scott, “Greater Love”, in Tales of Bohemia, Taverns, and the Underworld, London: Hurst and Blackett, page 226:

     The room was reminiscent of a seaside best parlour—red plush everywhere, and antimacassars and boxes made of shell, and innumerable mugs and lurid vases, and pots of artificial flowers of every conceivable colour which could possibly swear at the plush.