eau de toilette • [odətwalεt] n.f.

My friend asked me the other day why the French make their perfume with toilet water. Hmm. Well, first of all, they don’t. This is  a misconception due to the fact that she was thinking of the most common sense of the word toilet in Amercian English ; « bathroom fixture consisting of a bowl, usually with a hinged seat and lid, with flushing water, used for defecation and urination ».

But doesn’t the French word toilette also share the same meaning ?

Yes. The French language  also has more than one meaning for their word toilette. It is a polysemic word, which can often lead to misunderstandings, (especially when you don’t know all of the possible meanings of a word and misuse one casually in a conversation : but more on that later…).

So if it doesn’t come from a toilet, where does it come from ?

Well, it basically comes from toile « sort of woven cloth » + the diminutive suffix –ette. Hence, toilette « little woven cloth ».

How did a little cloth turn into my perfume ?

Semantic Evolution, my dear Watson. So in France around 1352 toilette was used to refer to the cloth used to wrap up clothes. And then in 1599 the word was used to refer to the piece of cloth on which they would lay out on a table or desk type piece of furniture, the ensemble of objects that they need to wash and get ready . Next in around 1661 through the process of metonymy the word toilette started refering  to the ensemble objects laying out on the « piece of little cloth ». (Obviously the semantic evolution of the French word toilette doesn’t stop here, otherwise we wouldn’t be refering to bathroom fixtures in either English or French as toilets/toilettes. But for my purposes that is probably far enough).

Eau de Toilette = Water of the ensemble of objects used to prepare oneself  laid out on a small piece of cloth.

So my friend, this is essentially what the words eau de toilette printed on your perfume bottle mean. And since the French language is chic and they can make the word toilette sound cool by saying things like faire sa toilette « prepare oneself », plus the litteral English translation was to long for the bottle. (Just kidding that would actually be more like eau de toilette sur toilette). The best translation would be more like water for getting ready.

Unfortunately the TLFi, one of the  greatest French dictionaries ever, has not yet included an article for the « locution nominal » eau de toilette,  but, it does appear in the citations in 7 other  articles (lavande « lavander » ; bidet ; dentifrice « toothpaste » ; entêter, fraîcheur « freshness » ; pilote « pilot » ; and interestingly enough suffocation. Upon an initial scan of the TLFi’s current citations the first attestation (at least amoung their references at this time) of eau de toilette appears to be in (ZOLA, Nana, 1880, p. 1206) « Dans le couloir, la suffocation augmentait encore; des aigreurs d’eau de toilette, des parfums de savons, l’empoisonnement des haleines ». I would be willing to go so far as to imagine that in France sometime between 1661 and 1880 eau de toilette made its  way into the French culture…and eventually into American culture as well.

The New Oxford American Dictionary contains an article for the noun eau de toilette ; their definition, « a dilute form of perfume ; toilet water ». Their etymology claims it comes from early 20th century French litterally ‘toilet-water’. »  Well it is no wonder my friend is confused if even the dictionaries like the Oxford is not explaining to which sense of toilet they’re refering.

In case you didn’t know (I hadn’t),  apparently the English language had also borrowed from the French  the sense « act or process of dressing and grooming oneself » of the word toilet. Knowing how most Americans are when it comes to talking about toilets (calling the rooms where you find them a bathroom or a restroom, the ladies room, the powder room etc.), I imagine that there are not a whole lot of people that going around using the word toilet when they say they are getting ready. Which is probably why quite a few people only think about bathroom fixture when they read those words eau de toilette on their perfume bottle.