• millefleurs • Pronunciation: meel-flur, meel-flêr • Hear it at alphadictionary Part of Speech: Adjective Meaning: 1. A pattern of many different colorful flowers, leaves and vines. 2. A perfume distilled from several different kinds of flowers. Notes: Thousands of flowers! Some US dictionaries prefer a singular spelling, millefleur, but we prefer adding the S since in French the word means a thousand flowers. English uses French millefeuille a thousand leaves to name a confection made of whipped cream and jam between thin leaves of puff pastry. Since it is a noun, it pluralizes normally: millefeuilles. The Italian counterpart of millefleurs is millefiori, the name of a clear glass paperweight embedded with glass rods of different sizes and colors cut cross-section to look like a multicolored flower arrangement. In Play: Not only is the millefleurs pattern visually striking, it can be very practical: Well, Maude Lynn Dresser loves millefleurs dresses because the food she drops on them is hard to see. Just be careful where you use this design: The dinner was wonderful except that I felt the millefleurs pattern on the dinner plates inappropriate for the dead plants and animals lying on them. Word History: Todays Good Word comes from a French prepositional phrase de mille fleurs of a thousand flowers. Mille is the French version of Latin mille thousand, the source of English mile (from mille passuum a thousand double paces). Fleur and flower share the same source, Latin flos, floris flower, blossom. The Latin [f] sound came from an earlier [bh] in the Proto-Indo-European stem bhel-, bhle- bloom, blossom. You guessed it: the old Germanic languages added the suffixes -s and -m and passed the resulting words down to English as blossom and bloom. (And now a mille mercis and a thousand thanks to Chris Berry for suggesting todays colorful Good Word.)
Posted on: Sun, 26 Jan 2014 00:55:27 +0000
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