console

Console as a furniture term comes from French console, which originally meant a bracket or corbel — a structural element projecting from a wall to support a shelf, statue, or ledge. The word may derive from Latin consolidāre (to make firm, to strengthen), though the connection is debated. What is clear is that the architectural bracket came first. The table came second.

The console table emerged in seventeenth-century France as a table that was literally attached to a wall, supported by brackets (consoles) rather than four legs. It had only two front legs, or sometimes none — the wall and its brackets held the weight. The table was inseparable from the wall. You could not pull it into the center of a room any more than you could pull a balcony off a building.

By the eighteenth century, freestanding console tables with their own four legs had appeared, but they retained the form of a wall-hugging piece: narrow, usually semicircular or rectangular, with a decorated front and an unfinished back. The back was unfinished because no one would ever see it. A console table with a finished back would be a confession that the owner might rearrange their furniture — a sign of impermanence unacceptable to the aristocratic aesthetic.

The word console has since attached to any control panel (a gaming console, a console in a car, a mixing console) through a separate French meaning: consoler (to comfort, to console), applied to the bracket-like supports on organ cases where musicians rest their hands. The furniture console and the electronic console share a word but almost nothing else.