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The Learning Kingdom's Cool Word of the Day for April 19, 1999
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furbelow [n. FUR-buh-low]
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Usually this word appears in the plural form, as part of a phrase:
"Those extra trimmings are nothing but frills and furbelows!" A
furbelow is a frilly decoration or trim on a woman's dress, like the
lacy edge of a petticoat, or a pleated border.
The word is seldom used today, but when it is it almost always carries
an implication of unnecessary trimmings or decorations, or something
that is excessively ostentatious and showy.
There's no connection with fur here. The word is from the Provencal
farbella (fringe), from Italian faldella (little pleat). That's the
diminutive of falda (flap, loose end), which is from an ancient
Germanic root that also gave us fold, as well as the -fold suffix
(twofold, threefold, etc).
A somewhat more distant connection from the same ancient root led to
the -uple series, including triple, octuple, decuple, multiple, and
the other numeric -uples.
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