commode

French commode derives from the Latin commodus — convenient, suitable, fitting — itself from com- (together, with) and modus (measure, manner, way). Latin commodus meant something well-proportioned, appropriate to the situation, agreeable. The French adjective commode (convenient) became a noun around the late 17th century, when it was applied to a new form of low chest of drawers that was fashionable in French interior design: the commode as furniture was, literally, a 'convenient' piece — compact, useful, offering organized storage at a useful height. It was a luxury object in the court of Louis XIV, where cabinetmakers including Boulle produced commodes of extraordinary elaboration.

The political career of the commode in French furniture ran from roughly 1700 through the entire 18th century, during which it became one of the most refined and technically demanding pieces in the French cabinetmaker's repertoire. The bombé commode — with its swelling, curved front and sides — is one of the defining forms of French Rococo furniture. Charles Cressent, Jacques Dubois, and Jean-Henri Riesener produced commodes that are now in the great museums of France and Britain. At Versailles, the commode was a prestige object, a marker of taste. It had nothing to do with sanitation.

The commode's sanitary meaning entered English through a different route. The 18th and 19th-century English practice of concealing chamber pots inside cabinet furniture — night tables, chair-shaped boxes, and low cupboards — produced pieces called 'necessary chairs,' 'close-stools,' and eventually 'commodes,' borrowing the French furniture name for the form in which the chamber pot was hidden. The logic was euphemism: the word for a fashionable French chest was applied to the piece of furniture designed to make a necessary function look like something else. By the 19th century, 'commode' in English meant specifically a piece of furniture housing a chamber pot.

The further semantic journey to the flush toilet is the final step in a long process of euphemistic displacement. As indoor plumbing replaced chamber pots in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the fixtures of the new bathroom inherited some of the vocabulary of what they replaced. 'Commode' in American English now refers to the porcelain toilet itself — the fixed plumbing fixture — though this usage is regional and slightly old-fashioned. The word has traveled from a Latin adjective meaning convenient to a piece of French luxury furniture to a cabinet for a chamber pot to the ceramic toilet. At each stage, the name was selected for what it implied rather than what it described.