Salon

How to spell salon

5 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce salon

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does salon mean?

1. nounA business that provides hairdressing, beauty, or grooming services.
2. nounA regular gathering of writers, artists, or intellectuals, often hosted in a private home.

Salon in a sentence

• She booked a colour appointment at the new salon downtown.

• The novelist hosted a weekly salon for poets and critics.

• The salon stayed open late to handle the wedding party.

• In eighteenth-century Paris, a fashionable salon shaped literary taste.

Where does salon come from?

Language of origin: French

Salon came into English in the early 1700s from French, where it named a large reception room or drawing room in a grand house. The French word was itself borrowed from the Italian salone, an enlarged form of sala meaning 'hall' or 'large room', and that Italian sala traces back to a Germanic root for a single-room dwelling, related to the Old English word 'sele' for a hall. In eighteenth-century Paris, fashionable hostesses held regular gatherings of writers and thinkers in such rooms, so 'salon' came to mean the gathering itself as well as the room. The word later attached to commercial premises offering grooming services, giving us the modern hair and beauty salon. English kept the French single-l spelling, which is the usual trap: writers sometimes double the l by analogy with words like 'balloon'.

How the word is built

• salon (a large reception room, from Italian sala 'hall')