Baroque

How to spell baroque

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce baroque

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does baroque mean?

1. adjectiveRelating to the highly ornate, elaborate style of European art, architecture, and music of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries; by extension, anything richly and excessively decorated.
2. nounThe ornate artistic style and the historical period in which it flourished, treated as a named movement.

Baroque in a sentence

• adjective

  The cathedral ceiling was decorated in an elaborate baroque style.

• noun

  The lecture traced the shift from the Renaissance to the baroque.

• adjective

  The orchestra specialised in baroque music by Bach and Vivaldi.

• noun

  Composers of the baroque favoured rich ornamentation and strong contrast.

Where does baroque come from?

Language of origin: French

This word travelled into English through French baroque, which in turn borrowed from the Portuguese barroco, a term that literally described a rough or irregularly shaped pearl rather than a perfectly round one. Jewellers and merchants used it for gems that were lumpy and asymmetrical, and the sense of 'irregular' or 'misshapen' clung to the word as it spread. By the eighteenth century critics applied it, often disapprovingly at first, to the lavish, heavily ornamented art, architecture, and music produced in Europe from roughly 1600 to 1750, art that they felt was overwrought rather than serene. English adopted it in the mid-1700s, and the original whiff of disapproval has since faded into a neutral or even admiring label for that grand, elaborate style. The spelling keeps its French shape: the silent, unexpected '-que' ending is the trap, since the word sounds as if it should finish in a simple 'k'.

How the word is built

• baroque (single root, from Portuguese barroco: a rough or irregularly shaped pearl)