the.com/chaise
furniture that lets you commit to lying down without admitting you've given up on sitting
means A chaise (short for chaise longue) is a long, reclining chair that supports your legs as well as your back, letting you stretch out while still technically being seated.
from Straight from French, where chaise simply means 'chair' — itself a dialect variant of the older chaire, from Latin cathedra, 'seat.' The full term is chaise longue, literally 'long chair.' English speakers, hearing 'longue' and seeing a lounging piece of furniture, often reshape it into 'chaise lounge' — a folk-spelling that makes perfect intuitive sense even though the original 'longue' just means long.
- french roots
- Means chair, though it lies down for a living
- long chair
- Chaise longue, not chaise lounge, despite everyone
- recamier fame
- Named for a woman who reclined beautifully in portraits
- fainting couch
- Victorian cousin built for tightly corseted swoons
- freud's tool
- Psychoanalysis happened on one for decades
chaise lounge — elongated upholstered seat for reclining, popularized in 18th-century france