What do you call the piece of furniture in your bedroom that has drawers, the place where you keep your socks, underwear, and other small items?

In the 1930s and 40s Linguistic Atlas data, bureau was the most common answer to this question. These days, the most common answer would be dresser. Personally, I call this piece a chest of drawers or even just a chest. The Atlas fieldworkers collected over 35 different terms for this piece of furniture, including sideboard, highboy, chiffonier, commode, dressing table, and stand of drawers.

I’ll be honest, when I first saw the Atlas list, I was concerned that the people they had talked to were, in fact, referring to very different pieces of furniture (I mean, a sideboard? In the bedroom?). So I did my own survey and I used pictures.

And guess what.

I got as many ‘weird’ terms with the illustrations as the Atlas guys had gotten with their original questions 60 years before. I felt compelled to figure out why there were so many different names for ‘chest of drawers’. And that’s when I started to get interested in the way that history leaves us with a lot of different ways to talk about everyday things.

Thus we have the story of Chester Drawers.

Chest as a word is pretty old (at least in relative terms to English), appearing first in writing in 700CE. The chest in America began with a hinged lid and was used for the storage of linens and clothes. As conditions in early America improved, cabinetmakers added decorative features such as paneled fronts, painted fronts and short legs. The addition of a wide drawer ﬁtted below the well of the chest created the form of a blanket chest, a form that is still familiar today. In New England, the blanket chest often had two wide drawers below the boxed well, covered with a lifting top.

This basic form continued to change as more drawers were inserted into runners that became part of the structure of the interior of the chest. The drawers ﬁlled the well of the chest, making it necessary to change the lid into a ﬁxed top. With this addition of drawers, we find the piece labeled literally as a chest of drawers.

Terms that reflect this same idea are nest of drawers and case of drawers.

As chests start getting bigger and taller, supports are added either in the form of brackets or feet. Tall forms on short yet slender legs was called a chiffonier, a term borrowed from French. In some instances, long legs were added to the bottom of the drawered chest, creating the highboy or chest on frame.

Chest on frame is a literal moniker; the large, box-shaped drawer section was set on top of an open frame with legs as a base. Also called a highboy (or tallboy in western VA, NC and SC), this tall chest of drawers became very popular in America.

Each variation of form signaled a variation in terminology. The chest on chest, or chest upon chest, is literally one slightly smaller chest of drawers stacked upon a larger chest of drawers. (The linen press carries out the same idea, but instead of one chest upon another, a press stacks a small cupboard on top of the larger-dimensioned chest of drawers. We will return to the offspring of the press when we take up the story of wardrobe.)

As the demand for decorative features increased, new forms with greatly detailed woodwork and painted decoration emerged. These “fancy” pieces were often given fancy names. The commode has a front of decorated doors instead of drawers and was intended for use in a dining room or formal sitting room. The commode moved to the bedroom as decorative features in “private” rooms gained importance.

Commode, borrowed from French, originally denoted a tall, wire-framed headdress worn by fashionable ladies in the late 1600s. By the first quarter of the 18th century, commode (in English only) is used as a term for a “procuress” (which is exactly what you think it is: one who procures a prostitute for a gentleman). It’s not until the late 1700s that commode appears in use as a piece of furniture (most likely, it was reborrowed from French with the new meaning of “elaborate chest of drawers”).

As furniture, the commode was often the bearer of a washbowl and basin (which explains the later semantic shift of the term to ‘toilet bowl’). Another term for the same piece, which was common in the southern Back Country, is washstand or wash hands stand.

During the early 1800s, we see a new role for the sideboard, as it moves out of the kitchen, where it was used for the storage of plates and dishes (a form and function related to, of course, and not at all confusingly, to a piece called a kitchen dresser). The sideboard comes to be used as both storage and decoration, usually placed in the dining room or living room. The Back Country term for a sideboard, slaboard, can still be heard in rural parts of North Carolina.

Other new names for forms come from cabinetmaker’s guides from the period, terms that advertise the function of the pieces represented within their pages. We see dressing drawers, dressing chest, dressing case, and even dressing commodes. One cabinetmaker described his piece as perfect for service in the bedroom as a receptacle for clothing, linens, and other dressing “equippage”.

So far, dresser is a term obvious in its absence in the discussion of the evolution of bedroom furniture and dressing accoutrement. Dresser is a medieval term whose original denotation was an open-shelved sideboard used in the kitchen for the dressing of meats. In Europe, the same piece was called a cupboard in the 15th and 16th c and a kitchen dresser in England in the 19th c. In the mid-17th c, one variation of this form lost its open shelves and resembled a table with long legs and small drawers under the top boards. In another variation, the piece was ﬁlled in with drawers, causing it to resemble a chest. With one form similar to that of a dressing table and another form similar to that of the chest, it is easy to see how the semantic shift from ‘dressing meats’ to ‘dressing a person’ could have been made.

The development of a sibling form, the desk or bureau, mirrors that of the chest. Prior to the late 1600s, American cabinetmakers did not make “desks.” Instead, an upright box coupled with a stool served the function of a writing surface. Prior to 1700, a box with a slanting lid served as a writing surface, sometimes referred to simply as a writing box. After 1700, the bureau desk appeared as a multipurpose form. The piece had three or four drawers beneath a slanted writing surface, often called a slant-front, so that it could function as a desk as well as storage for papers or linens. The form consisted of a set of drawers topped with a movable, ﬂat surface that could be lowered for writing and in the upright position served as a cover for a space ﬁlled with small drawers or cubbyhole compartments. Bureau was used originally for the slant front, and later generalized to become the name for the entire piece and for other similar forms. In the late 17th and early 18th c, a bureau was a desk. Soon, the desk was lifted onto a frame, and the resulting form, desk on frame or desk with stand, was renamed with the French term secretaire, which was later Americanized to secretary. Eventually, we see an alteration in the form of bureaus, as they come to be made not with a slant-front but with a movable writing surface that, when upright, was ﬂush with the drawer fronts below. When closed, the bureau would look exactly like a chest of drawers. Some pieces had, instead of the slant-front or false top drawer, a board that pulled out from above the ﬁrst drawer When not in use, this piece too looked just like a chest of drawers. These two innovations were probably responsible for the shift in meaning that follows, as the term bureau moves from referencing a piece that functioned as a desk to referencing various forms of the chest of drawers. Bureau, in this sense, would have been at its heydey in the 30-40s and American speech has since moved on to prefer dresser. And yet, all of the terms that I have mentioned still float along in American English somewhere (even if it’s just on handwritten antique store price-tags). I like to think that a collection of terms such as these capture bits and pieces of American social and cultural history. At the very least, a history such as this one can give us a glimpse of the reasons behind the large number of terms involved in the story of Chester Drawers.