Word of the Day

: January 2, 2025

potpourri

noun poh-pur-REE

What It Means

Potpourri is a mixture of dried flower petals, leaves, and spices that is used to make a room smell pleasant. When used figuratively potpourri refers to a collection of various different things.

// Her favorite winter potpourri includes cinnamon sticks, cloves, and orange peel.

// The book is a potpourri of stories about family, community, and food.

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potpourri in Context

“The windows here are festooned with a potpourri of book jackets, portraits of Ataturk cheek by jowl with Turkey’s great poet of opposition, Nâzım Hikmet, and stars of Yeşilçam, the populist Turkish cinema of days gone by.” — Barry Yourgrau, LitHub.com, 15 Feb. 2023

Did You Know?

Some people delight in the scent of potpourri, and others find it cloying. Happily, this word manages to contain elements which will make each of these groups feel that their preferences are linguistically supported. Potpourri is used today to refer literally to a fragrant mixture of flowers, herbs, etc., and figuratively to a miscellaneous collection, or medley, of things. But potpourri first referred to a kind of stew of meat and vegetables, usually including sausage and chickpeas. It was borrowed from French, where pot pourri translates directly as “putrid pot”; the French word was a translation of the Spanish olla podrida, which likewise means “rotten pot.” We don't know why both the Spanish and the French gave their stews such unappetizing names, although it has been suggested that the Spanish method of slowly cooking this dish over a fire may have had something to do with it. Regardless, after referring solely to stew for its first hundred and some-odd years, potpourri began to be used for an aromatic blend of dried flowers in the middle of the 18th century, and within the next hundred years was being applied to mixtures and collections of all kinds of things.