Armchair

How to spell armchair

8 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce armchair

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does armchair mean?

1. nounA comfortable chair with supports on each side for the arms.
2. adjectiveDescribing someone who comments confidently on an activity without taking part in it themselves.

Armchair in a sentence

• noun

  He sank into the leather armchair with a cup of tea.

• adjective

  Every armchair critic had a theory about how the team should have played.

• noun

  The reading lamp stood beside her favourite armchair.

• adjective

  His armchair expertise on running a business came from never having done it.

Where does armchair come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is a straightforward English compound joining two very old words. The first element, 'arm', comes from the Old English 'earm', the native Germanic word for the limb between the shoulder and the hand, and here it names the side supports on which a sitter rests the arms. The second element, 'chair', travelled a longer road: it derives from the Latin 'cathedra', meaning a seat or bishop's throne, which itself was borrowed from the Greek 'kathedra', literally 'a sitting down', and it reached English through Old French 'chaiere' in the 1200s. The compound 'armchair' was assembled in English and is first recorded in the early 1600s to describe a chair with raised sides for the arms. By the late nineteenth century it also gained a figurative use, describing someone who offers confident opinions on a subject (sport, war, politics) while doing nothing in practice, as if comfortably seated rather than taking action. Because both halves are familiar everyday words, the spelling holds no real surprise once you see it as plain 'arm' plus 'chair'.

How the word is built

• arm (the limb support)
• chair (a seat); a transparent compound naming a chair fitted with arm rests