dresser
Pluraldressers
- 1A piece of bedroom furniture resembling a low chest of drawers, often topped with a mirror.
The movers struggled to get the antique dresser up the narrow staircase.
He emptied the dresser drawers into a suitcase the night before the move.
Similarbureau, chest, chiffonier
Note
In American homes the word moves upstairs. It names the low chest of drawers in a bedroom, often with a mirror on top, and bureau is its close neighbor. British readers keep the word for the shelved kitchen cabinet, so they may picture plates where an American pictures folded shirts. Chest of drawers is the safe choice when writing for both audiences.
- 2An item of kitchen furniture, typically a cabinet with open shelves above, used for storing dishes and utensils.
The oak dresser in the farmhouse kitchen displayed three generations of china.
She kept the serving spoons in the bottom drawer of the old pine dresser.
Similarhutch, sideboard, cupboard, buffet
Note
The British kitchen piece, and the furniture word with a French pedigree: Middle English dressour, borrowed from Old French drecëur. It is for display as much as storage. Longfellow's pewter plates catch the firelight on one, and in D. H. Lawrence's Sons and Lovers (1913) a man lurches against one and sets its tins rattling. American English uses the same word for the bedroom chest of drawers, so say kitchen dresser when readers are mixed.
- 3Someone described by the way they usually dress, as in a smart, sloppy, or flamboyant dresser.
Colleagues knew him as the snappiest dresser in the office.
Even as a teenager she was a flamboyant dresser, mixing vintage scarves with combat boots.
Note
Here the word is a separate English coinage, dress plus -er, and has nothing to do with the French-derived furniture word it happens to spell. On its own it says almost nothing, because an adjective does the judging: a snappy dresser, a flamboyant dresser. Without one, a listener is left asking what kind.
- 4A wardrobe assistant in theater, film, or television who helps performers into their costumes.
Her dresser had ninety seconds to get her out of the ballgown and into the maid's uniform.
The touring production hired local dressers at each venue to manage the quick changes.
Note
A backstage job title in the wardrobe department. The work is getting performers into and out of costume, often against the clock during quick changes, and keeping each costume ready for its scene. Principal performers may be assigned a dresser of their own, while an ensemble shares a wardrobe crew. In a production's credits the word is purely professional and carries no hint of a stylish person.
- 5A personal servant, especially to royalty, who assists with dressing and similar daily tasks.
As the queen's dresser, she chose and cared for the royal wardrobe for thirty years.
The duke's dresser was the only servant permitted in the private chambers before breakfast.
Note
A household post at court with quarters of its own. The Railway Magazine of 1947 lists a dresser's room on the South African royal train, alongside the lady-in-waiting's compartment. Craig Brown's Hello Goodbye Hello (2013) names Isobel Mathieson as Princess Margaret's dresser. The title is attached to the person served: the Queen's dresser, the Princess's dresser.
- 6An assistant to a surgeon who helps with tasks such as dressing wounds.
He spent a year as a dresser at the teaching hospital before qualifying.
The dresser changed the bandages on the ward each morning before rounds.
Note
A hospital rank rather than a description. In Conan Doyle's A Study in Scarlet (1887), young Stamford "had been a dresser under" Watson at Bart's, a junior who served a senior surgeon. In Anthony Burgess's Beds in the East (1959), the Tamil hospital dresser in Malaya is a paramedical worker in his own right. The word takes under for the surgeon served and at for the hospital.
- 7A football hooligan who wears designer clothing; a member of the casual subculture.
By the mid-eighties, every firm had its dressers turning up in Italian sportswear and rare trainers.
He was a dresser, more interested in his Stone Island jacket than in the match itself.
Similarcasual
Note
A label from British football culture, used alongside casual, and the point of it is the clothes. Jay Allan's Bloody Casuals (2015) sets his crew, the only dressers in Scotland, against rivals easily recognized by their denims and DMs, skinheads and parkas. Outside writing about football, a reader will likely take the word as someone who dresses a certain way, so the context needs to make the subculture clear.
- 8A worker who dresses stone, shaping and finishing rough blocks for use in building.
The quarry employed a dresser to square the limestone blocks before shipment.
Granite dust hung in the shed where the dressers worked their chisels.
Similarstonecutter, stonemason, mason, hewer
Note
In the trades the word is usually joined to the material being worked. Frank Bennett and Alfred Pinion's Roof Slating and Tiling (2015) describes the slate-dresser in the dressing sheds, sawing blocks to size and splitting the smaller pieces into sheets. Naming the stone makes the job clear, since dresser alone could point to any of the word's other meanings.
- 9A mechanical device used in ore mills for dressing ore, such as crushing, sorting, or sifting it.
The mill installed a new dresser to separate the crushed ore by size.
Steam power drove the dressers that pulverized the ore before smelting.
Similarseparator
- 10A mechanical device used in grain mills for bolting, sifting ground meal through cloth to separate flour from bran.
Ground meal passed from the millstones into the dresser, which sifted out the bran.
The old water mill still has its original dresser with silk bolting cloth.
Similarbolter
- 11A kind of pick used for shaping large lumps of coal.
He trimmed the oversized lumps with a dresser before loading them into the tub.
The dressers hung beside the shovels at the pithead.
Note
A collier's tool, named for dressing in its sense of preparing raw material. The pick trims oversized lumps of coal to size and shape before they move on, in the same way that the stone worker dresses rough blocks. It belongs to mining vocabulary and is unlikely to be understood outside the trade without some context.
Less common meaning
- 12A table or bench on which meat and other foods are prepared for cooking or use.
The kitchen boy hauled the side of venison onto the dresser for the cook to joint.
Knives, cleavers, and a worn wooden dresser furnished the back kitchen of the inn.
Note
An older kitchen word, now dated, in which the dresser is the work surface rather than the shelves: a bench where meat was dressed, or made ready, for the cook. It shares the kitchen with the shelved cabinet but not its origin. This one is the English verb plus -er, not the French loan. In older texts, look for the meat or knives on it to tell which piece of furniture is meant.
Practice
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Origins
From Middle English dressure, dressor, or dressour, borrowed from Old French drecëur, which comes from the verb dresser.
From Middle English dresser, formed from 'dress' plus the suffix '-er'.