Word of the Day

: April 3, 2013

boulevardier

noun bull-uh-vahr-DYAY

What It Means

: a frequenter of the Parisian boulevards; broadly : man-about-town

boulevardier in Context

Trevor fancies himself something of a boulevardier, and he appears in the newspaper's society pages often enough that the label seems apt.

"Effervescent and boyish, he has a boulevardier's bounce and a performer's panache." - From an article by Mark Feeney in the New York Times, November 4, 2012

Did You Know?

The first boulevardiers got their name from the thoroughfares they frequented: the typically straight and geometrically precise boulevards of Paris. These particular men must have cut an impressive figure because the word "boulevardier" was eventually applied to any worldly and socially active man. Unlike many near-synonyms, "boulevardier" is generally a complimentary term. It differs from "flaneur" in that the latter refers to someone who is idle, and it doesn't imply the same vanity and foolishness that words like "fop," "dandy," and "coxcomb" do.