Definitions
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
- n. An ornamental flower garden having the beds and paths arranged to form a pattern.
- n. See parquet circle.
Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- n. In horticulture, a system of beds of different shapes and sizes in which flowers are cultivated, arranged in some design or plan, with intervening spaces of gravel or turf.
- n. The part of the floor of a theater beneath the galleries: in some modern English theaters called the pit—a sense to be distinguished from the original meaning of pit.
Wiktionary
- n. A flowerbed, particularly an elevated one (Wikipedia).
- n. A garden with paths between such flowerbeds.
- n. A theater balcony, especially in an opera house; above the box seats, but definitely below family circle (Wikipedia).
- n. US, New York An apartment balcony.
GNU Webster's 1913
- n. (Hort.) An ornamental and diversified arrangement of beds or plots, in which flowers are cultivated, with intervening spaces of gravel or turf for walking on.
- n. France The pit of a theater; the parquet.
WordNet 3.0
- n. an ornamental flower garden; beds and paths are arranged to form a pattern
- n. seating at the rear of the main floor (beneath the balconies)
Etymologies
- French (Wiktionary)
- French, from Old French, ornamental garden, from par terre, on the ground : par, over, on; see paramount + terre, ground (from Old French, from Latin terra, earth). (American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition)
Examples
“From the middle of the parterre is a descent by many steps flying on each side of a grotto that lies between them (covered with lead and flat) into the lower garden, which is all fruit trees ranged about the several quarters of a wilderness, which is very shady; the walks here are all green, the grotto embellished with figures of shell rock work, fountains, and water works.”
Letters from Dorothy Osborne to Sir William Temple (1652-54)
“But the word parterre, even the idea of a parterre, fit.”
“My dear Fleda! if my eyes cannot rest upon that development of elegance, the parterre is become a wilderness to me!”
“In the centre of the parterre is a figure with a trident, which represents the Morava, the national river of Servia, and is in reality a Roman statue found near”
“But during those twenty years Nature had made herself a garden of flowers, a blooming "parterre" for her own enjoyment, just as an artist gives himself the delight of painting a picture for his own happiness.”
“Smokey déguisé en brin d'herbe ou en fleur de parterre .....”
“(Smokey disguised as a blade of grass) ou en fleur de parterre .....”
“Richardson & Wrench The property has dry-stone walls, a vegetable garden, citrus orchard and parterre, or ornamental garden shown with peony trees and roses.”
“Smokey déguisé en brin d'herbe ou en fleur de parterre.....”
“Here, the meticulous order of the knot garden can be seen giving way to the more colourful and eclectic parterre, the decorative and the practical – even the political – going hand in hand.”
Lists
These user-created lists contain the word ‘parterre’.
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phrontistery - p
from phrontistery.info
pustule, purulence, pushful, purser, purpureal, putative, purpure, purpresture, purloin, purline, purlieu, purlicue and 1766 more...
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French words in German language
words and phrases with french background commonly used in the german language, so-called "Gallizismen"
trottoir, paravent, rayon, perron, fauteuil, garage, arrangement, etablissement, portemonnaie, parterre, coupé, voliere and 123 more...
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patterns
ergodic, stochastic, stereopsis, echolocation, holocation, broker, map, intarsia, encipher, ocellus, muslin, mandelbrot set and 159 more...
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Learned (or Encountered) in Reading
I have a list for words learned from Newsweek; here's where I keep all the stuff from other shit I read.
Except when I'm looking stuff up and find new words that way. Those go on their...cellie, laminectomy, mridangam, terroir, hypospadias, crus, corpora cavernosa, crura, uretheral meatus, bartholin's gland, coloquintida, colopexy and 921 more...
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Jane Eyre
abigail, sanguine, chancel, bourne, peremptorily, parley, unwonted, fagging, convolvuli, tarry, insuperable, execrations and 190 more...
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words
diplopic, dolorous, farrago, surety, scuttlebutt, Arabesque, infarct, neurasthenia, lambent, expurge, univocal, simper and 395 more...
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looked up
Words I've come across while reading and looked up in the dictionary.
deesis, pendentive, revetment, aedicule, stemma, patera, ephod, entrepot, corbel, exedra, volute, archivolt and 1406 more...
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19 c.
some of the interesting words i've had to look up while reading 19th century lit
maugre, connate, alembic, azote, vaticination, valetudinarian, dight, scutcheon, lammergeyer, chamois, asseverate, prebendary and 199 more...
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for words
based upon per- indo-european root
turnverein, veer, frump, far, per, paramount, paramour, parget, parterre, parvenu, perissodactyl, palanquin and 133 more...
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Words of the Day
glabella, chirotony, nook-shotten, crapehanger, filemot, swirlie, egosurf, lexiphanicism, Ruritanian, stichometry, chrononaut, faldstool and 2014 more...
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Words Covered in Faery Dust (P)
words that evoke magic, mystery, mayhem, magnificence or anything else that glimmers in the grass
pagan, page, pageant, pageboy, pagoda, paisley, paladin, palfrey, paling, pampas grass, pan, panoply and 194 more...
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R.L. Stevenson - An Inland Voyage
Words that I had to look up, or that I liked, from Robert Louis Stevenson's travelogue 'An Inland Voyage'.
recaptor, befrogged, burgee, emulous, viand, gymnosophist, amphora, sublunary, landau, flibbertigibbet, jeremiad, bastinado and 27 more...
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Useful Words
I can use these.
aptronym, haplology, ectopia, folderol, volute, caryatid, spandrel, pendulous, miasmic, gelid, dotty, anomie and 256 more...
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space
plenum, exergue, ramage, berth, lacuna, swath, hollow, gap, expanse, between, margin, spandrel and 88 more...
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Kiki's List
plethora, mitigation, quixotic, sanguine, sanguinary, bloodthirsty, seppuku, harikari, mixologist, mise en place, robust, disputatious and 38 more...
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I've Run a Fowles.
Words from The Magus
magus, bougainvillea, innermost, numen, imbricate, bilges, sandal-wood, incorporeal, fleshpot, desipience, batrachian, caique and 82 more...
Tweets
Looking for tweets for parterre.
chained_bear "Plant in this boughs of green, bushes, and all the flowers that can be filled in. Nothing is prettier, in the centre of a table, than this little parterre. . . . Variety may be made by adding rocks, vases, and columns to the parterre; vases of flowers, at the corners of the table, may also be added."
—Susan Williams, Savory Suppers and Fashionable Feasts: Dining in Victorian America (New York: Pantheon Books, 1985), 153 May 3, 2010
jaime_d from Thoreau's A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers Jul 19, 2009