Unsurprisingly, a full list of English words originating in the names of French towns and cities would be dominated by culinary terms and the names of a great many foods and wines identified by their place of origin. Besides familiar examples like champagne, Bordeaux and Dijon mustard, however, are a number of much less familiar dishes: a pithivier is a rich puff-pastry tart of almond paste and cream, named after the town of Pithiviers outside Paris; a plombière is a dessert of glacé fruit and cream originally made in Plombières-les-Bains near Strasbourg; a pavie is a type of peach first grown in the town of the same name close to the Spanish border; and a perigord is a type of rich meat pie flavoured with truffles, originating in the Périgord region of the French south-west.
Outside of the kitchen, French place names are somewhat rarer in English, but are nevertheless encountered in the names of several different fabrics and textiles including DENIM, and, hinting at the country’s mineral-rich geology, the names of a number of rocks and minerals, including BAUXITE, one of the most important minerals in the modern world.
The adjective artesian literally refers to the historical French province of Artois, now subsumed by the Pas-de-Calais department on France’s north coast. In English, the term is most often encountered in reference to an artesian well, a method of accessing fresh water by drilling straight down into a water-rich layer of sloping rock beneath the ground, the raised angle of which maintains a constant pressure that pushes the water upwards through the well with little extra mechanical force required. The first recorded reference to an artesian well in English dates from the early nineteenth century, but this method of raising water is known to have been used throughout Artois since at least the Middle Ages.
Bauxite is the chief commercial ore from which aluminium is obtained, making it arguably one of the most widely used ores in the world today. A dense, clayey rock typically containing a mixture of aluminium hydroxides, iron oxide and silica, bauxite takes its name from the town of Baux, or Les Baux-de-Provence, near Arles in the south of France, where rocks containing the mineral were first discovered by the French geologist Pierre Berthier in 1821.
Dating from the early 1600s in English, in its earliest sense the word bayonet described a short, flat pocket-dagger, but today it is generally only associated with the steel blade attached to the muzzle of a rifle or another similarly long-barrelled firearm, effectively turning it into a spear or pike. The origin of the word is uncertain, but it is likely that it is derived from the name of the French city of Bayonne, where blades like these were once presumably manufactured.
Originally used for the name of a type of tough woollen fabric or serge, but now almost exclusively used to describe the thick cotton used to make jeans and other items, denim takes its name from the two-word French phrase de Nîmes, making mention of the city in the south of France where it was first made. Denim is just one of a number of textiles named from their French origins: bewpers, a cloth once used to make flags, comes from Beaupréau near Nantes; lawn, a type of linen, probably derives from the town of Laon in Picardy; olderon, a coarse fabric used to make sails, is thought to derive from Oléron, an island in the Bay of Biscay; and shalloon, a woollen fabric used as a lining cloth, derives from Châlons-en-Champagne in Marne, as does chalon, the name of a type of blanket or bed covering.
The adjective Jurassic pertains to the period of geological history roughly 200 to 145 million years ago during which the dinosaurs flourished and early bird-like creatures began to evolve. Widely familiar in everyday English thanks to the popularity of the Jurassic Park film franchise, the term is derived from the name of the Jura Mountains, which straddle the border between France, Switzerland and Germany, and which are largely comprised of a form of limestone that characterizes the geological formations dating from this period. In English, the word Jurassic was first used in 1831, but in fact the term is known to have been coined somewhat earlier by the eighteenth- to nineteenth-century Prussian naturalist and explorer, Alexander von Humboldt.
In English, the first use of the word limousine in reference to cars was recorded in 1902, when it applied specifically to a motor car comprising an open driver’s seat and a separate, enclosed compartment for passengers. Before this, the term was purely used as an adjective referring to the Limousin region of central France. It is thought that when the first limousine cars were produced, the outer covering of the passenger compartment so resembled the hoods of Limousin shepherds that the word stuck and eventually evolved the meaning by which it is most familiar today.
In English, the word martingale dates from the early sixteenth century when it was first used as the name of a type of horse’s harness, comprising a set of straps attached at one end around the girth and to the bit or noseband at the other, which was used to stop the horse from rearing up. In the nineteenth century, however, the term came to be used as the name of a type of betting system in which a losing player must double their stake in the hope that any future win would be great enough to offset all previous losses. In both contexts, martingale likely derives from martengal, an old French term for an inhabitant of Martigues, near Marseilles, which was originally used in French for the name of a type of breeches fastened around the waist and tied at the back, from where the horse’s harness took its name. The connection between martengal and the martingale betting system, however, is unclear.
In music, a picardie – or, more fully, a tierce de Picardie, or Picardy third – is the use of a major chord at the end of a piece of music that is otherwise written in a minor key, specifically a change made by raising a minor third (such as C and E-flat) by a semitone to a major third (C and E natural). Particularly associated with baroque music, this technique is also widely encountered in hymns and other religious music, as well as even in some pop and rock songs and traditional folk songs – the ‘Coventry Carol’ (‘Lullay, lullay, Thou little tiny child’), for instance, has a familiar picardie ending. First described in English in the late seventeenth century, the origin of the term and quite why it should be named after the French region of Picardy are unknown, although it is popularly claimed that because this minor-to-major resolution is so prevalent in religious music, it may have simply originated amongst the innumerable churches and cathedrals of north-east France.
A rokelay or rocklay is a type of women’s cloak, typically short in length, which was popular in Europe during the eighteenth century. Although its derivation is unclear, it is likely that the word is related to the somewhat earlier term roquelaure, the name of a type of gentleman’s cloak of considerably longer length and worn with a long, hanging collar. In turn, the roquelaure takes its name from that of a small village and duchy in the south-west of France whose local duke, Antoine-Gaston Jean Baptiste, an eighteenth-century Marshal of France, was supposedly a famous wearer of just such a garment.
The troy weight system, which is still used today as the standard system for weighing and measuring precious metals and gemstones, dates back as far as the late fourteenth century. Similar but not identical to the much more familiar imperial system (a troy pound, for instance, contains twelve ounces rather than sixteen), the troy system itself is of uncertain origin, but its name is believed to derive from the French market town of Troyes, south-east of Paris, where the system was presumably first used.