trousseau

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trousseau

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The trousseau (left) of Archduchess Elisabeth Marie of Austria (1883–1963) when she married Otto Weriand, Prince of Windisch-Graetz. It included the Edelweiss-Star diamond jewels by A. E. Köchert that her grandmother, Empress Elisabeth of Austria, wore in her hair for a famous 1865 portrait by Franz Xaver Winterhalter (right).

Borrowed from French trousseau, diminutive of trousse (“bundle”).

• (Received Pronunciation) IPA^(key): /ˈtɹuːsəʊ/

  • Audio (Southern England):

    (file)

• (General American) IPA^(key): /ˈtɹuˌsoʊ/
• Rhymes: -uːsəʊ
• Hyphenation: trous‧seau

trousseau (plural trousseaus or trousseaux)

1. The clothes and linen, etc., that a bride collects or that is given to her for her wedding and married life, especially a traditional or formal set of these.
   • 1906 September 29, The Literary Digest, volume XXXIII, number 13 (whole no., 858), New York, N.Y.: Funk & Wagnalls Company, publishers, 44 to 60 East 23d Steet, New York, →OCLC, page 439:

     Trousseaus of German Heiresses.—Despatches from Berlin told recently of the visit to that city of a wealthy German mother and her two daughters. for the purpose of buying trousseaus for the girls who are said to be perhaps the richest heiresses of the world. […] Frau Krupp, widow of the great gunmaker of Essen [Friedrich Alfred Krupp], and her daughters, Bertha and Barbara, have just been here, the object of their visit being to buy the wedding-trousseaus for her daughters.

   • 1918, Leo Tolstoy, Louise and Aylmer Maude, transl., Anna Karenina, a Novel (World's Classics; 211), : Oxford University Press, OCLC 6561729; republished Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998, ISBN 978-0-19-158623-1, page 435:

     Consequently, having decided to divide her daughter's trousseau into two parts, a lesser and a larger, the Princess eventually consented to have the wedding before Advent.

   • 2006, Denyse Baillargeon, translated by Yvonne Klein, Making Do: Women, Family and Home in Montreal during the Great Depression (Studies in Childhood and Family in Canada), Waterloo, Ont.: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, →ISBN, page 60:

     In a study of the trousseau in France, Agnès Fine observes that, regardless of its contents and its value, the trousseau represented an essential in women's lives; through the first half of the twentieth century, at least, it seemed altogether inconceivable to be married without the provision of a trousseau. But while in the sixteenth century it involved the furniture of a bride's bedroom, bit by bit the trousseau was reduced to linen, especially to sheets.

   • 2006, Paul Sant Cassia, Constantina Bada, The Making of the Modern Greek Family: Marriage and Exchange in Nineteenth-century Athens (Cambridge Studies in Social and Cultural Anthropology), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, →ISBN, page 81:

     There is further significance in the transmission of cash and trousseaux. To begin with, they appear in inverse proportion to each other across time, for example trousseaux appear more important in the eighteenth century, whereas by the 1830s they had declined in favour of cash endowments.

2. (obsolete) A bundle.

• bottom drawer
• dowry
• glory box, glory-box
• hope chest

Inherited from Middle French trousseaul, from Old French torsel, diminutive of torse, trusse, from Old French trosser, trusser. More at trousser.

• IPA^(key): /tʁu.so/

• Audio:

  (file)

trousseau m (plural trousseaux)

1. bunch (of keys)
2. trousseau

• “trousseau”, in Trésor de la langue française informatisé , 2012.