Boutique

How to spell boutique

8 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce boutique

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does boutique mean?

1. nounA small shop selling fashionable clothes, accessories, or other specialist goods.
2. adjectiveDescribing a small business that offers specialised or upmarket products and services.

Boutique in a sentence

• noun

  She opened a small boutique selling handmade jewellery in the old quarter.

• adjective

  He left the big firm to join a boutique law practice handling only film contracts.

• noun

  The designer sells her dresses through one exclusive boutique in the city.

• adjective

  The couple booked a room at a boutique hotel with only twelve suites.

Where does boutique come from?

Language of origin: French

This word came into English from French boutique, which simply meant 'a small shop' or 'a tradesman's stall'. The French term traces back through Old Provençal botica to the Latin apotheca, a 'storehouse', which itself was borrowed from the Greek apothēkē, meaning a 'place where things are put away' or a 'depot' (from apo 'away' and tithenai 'to put'). English first took the word in the early 1700s with its plain French sense of a small retail shop, but in the twentieth century it narrowed to mean a fashionable, small-scale shop selling clothing or specialist goods. Interestingly, that same Greek apothēkē root also gave English 'apothecary', the old word for a pharmacist, so a chic dress shop and a medieval chemist are linguistic cousins. The spelling keeps its French shape entirely, which is exactly the trap: the 'ou' vowel and the silent French '-que' ending sound nothing like they look.

How the word is built

• boutique (from French boutique: a small shop, ultimately from Greek apothēkē 'storehouse')