h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

'Pouffe' can also be made 'tuffet', all the vowels long with the first, in romantic phonetics, all the vowels short with the second with germane phonetics.

I sometimes use one as a backrest for sitting up in bed or reclining on a couch.

We don't have a lounge in my house, as that's a part of a pub. We have a sitting room.

The French "chaise longue" became the English chaise lounge, which is a sort of elongated piece of lawn furniture, a chair with a very long spot for the feet to rest on.

It's still chaise longue in British English. It's only in America it got corrupted to chaise lounge.

We Americans like to do it bigger and louder, whether it's right or wrong .

Do you mean 'living room' or 'front room' Gnomon?

PP.

I've heard that some people call their sittkng the 'living room'.

I've heard that some people call their sitting room the 'living room'.

And my Grandmother called it 'the parlour' - but it was hardly ever used.

PP.

When I was a child, it was a settee. I can't remember what we called the room - it was the 'front room' in one house, but not in the next. Living room, I think.

As an adult I call it a sofa, and, because we have only ever had two downstairs rooms in our various homes, it lives in the 'other' room (ie the one that isn't the kitchen).

A whatnot is a set of triangular shelves that fits into a corner (Laura Ingalls Wilder describes how to make one, in one of her books).

A couch is a chaise-longue, in my little world. We once stayed in a holiday home which had one in the pantry

Pouffe is a word we don't use any more - when I was a child, our living room had two. We do have an item of furniture now that we *could* call that, but, looking at it, I'm not sure what we *do* call it. 'Where Osh sits', I think.

Supper is the final meal of the day - a bowl of cereal when we were kids, but yesterday my supper was also my dinner (fishcake and asparagus). Generally in this house we have lunch and tea (ie, no meal that we call dinner), and if lunch is a cooked meal we call the next meal a 'hand tea', because (being sandwiches and fruit) it's eaten without cutlery.

Mol

"pouffe, a backless, usu. round, cushionlike seat, often large enough for several people."
http://www.thefreedictionary.com/pouf

I guess in my house it would have been called a hassock or footrest, except that when we had them, they were more likely to be square and to have stuff stored in them.

I don't think I've ever seen one "large enough for several people"! Usually you'd be doing well if you managed to squeeze two on to it!

My parents used to store old newspapers in it. Once it filled up, they would take the newspapers to the dump...

When I was a child we had a settee in the front room. Now I think of it as a sofa.

Dinner used to be the midday meal, but over time it has shifted to being the evening meal. For me, the midday meal has been lunch for as long as I can remember. Tea (as a meal) involves things like sandwiches and cake. It's not what I call a serious meal. I can't remember what we called the evening meal when I was a child. It may have been supper. Now it's definitely dinner.

A pouffe is a low squishy thing to sit on or rest your feet on, IMO. If it's more solid than that, it's something else depending on how it's used. I have a beanbag footrest that *could* be called a pouffe but isn't. It's too small to be anything but a footrest.

I'm grew up in the West Midlands and live in Warwickshire. I'm well over 40.