Origin Story
A portrait made not with costly paint but by cutting a profile out of black paper — we call it a silhouette. Yet this name came from one man's surname. In 1759, with the French treasury in dire straits, finance minister Étienne de Silhouette imposed harsh austerity measures, and people mocked his stinginess as he cut back on everything. At the same time, a cheap fashion for profile portraits made by cutting paper rather than painting in expensive oils was catching on, and people sneeringly called these humble, frugal pictures "in the Silhouette manner." And so the name of a tight-fisted minister came to denote a picture stripped of color and depth, leaving only an outline.
Curiously, some accounts claim Minister Silhouette himself enjoyed cutting black-paper portraits as a hobby. Either way, his name endures as a symbol of frugality and simplicity.
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Online Etymology Dictionarysilhouette (n.): 1798, from French silhouette, in reference to Étienne de Silhouette (1709-1767), French minister of finance in 1759, noted for his parsimony
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Oxford English Dictionarysilhouette: named after Étienne de Silhouette, French finance minister, associated with cheapness
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Merriam-Webster DictionaryFrench, from Étienne de Silhouette, French controller general of finances
Word Evolution
Words from the Same Root
Memory Hook
A silhouette is the miserly minister Silhouette. Remember it as "a picture that skips the expensive paint and leaves only the black outline."
""Where color and light were cut away, only the name of one stingy minister remained.""
