Portiere

[Morbius]

My congratulations to the small number of people who managed to get a rosette in yesterday's 10 letter puzzle, all of whom obviously got the word portiere.  Alas, I was one of the many who didn't get it.  Is portiere really a common word?  I've never heard it before.

[mkenuk]

I did know it and did play it - thanks to an old French song I was taught at school more than 50 years ago and which I can still remember! Common (ie familiar to an educated native speaker of English)? Probably not, imvho.

Coincidence I'm sure, but there seem to have been a lot of French words recently - I think I counted five in 'geometric' -moire, émigré, regime, crème and métier - plus 'epee' in 'speediest'.

MK

[rogue_mother]

Add me to the list of people who did not know this word. I had to look it up, and after that I still did not recall ever having seen it.

[Butcherbird]

When I was growing up in the tropics, we left our doors open to catch the breeze so we had a portiere in all our doorways to keep out the bugs.  Nowadays they have all these new-fangled mesh thingies.

[birdy]

I've noticed (and commented on) the tendency to accept more French words than those from other countries (Italy, Germany, Spain).  My feeling has been that the British are more commonly taught French as a second language than others, so they've picked up those words as part of their language.  I think in the U.S., we tend to use more words of Spanish origin.  Of course, in NYC, we still use a lot of Yiddish words and phrases - I picked them up when I moved here years ago. 

[Alan W]

The word has now been made rare.