oubliette

The French word oubliette comes from oublier, 'to forget,' from Latin oblivisci (the same root that gives English 'oblivion'). An oubliette was a dungeon accessed only through a trapdoor in the ceiling. There were no doors, no windows, no stairs. You were lowered in or dropped in, and the trapdoor closed. The name was the sentence: you were put into a place designed for forgetting, and then you were forgotten.

Oubliettes appear in the architecture of medieval European castles and fortresses. The most famous are in the Bastille (before its destruction), the Chateau de Pierrefonds, and the Chateau de Loches, where the oubliette is a narrow shaft cut into rock. Whether they were used as frequently as legend suggests is debated -- some historians argue that many 'oubliettes' were actually storage pits or latrines misidentified by later, more imaginative visitors. But some are clearly purpose-built confinement holes.

English borrowed 'oubliette' by the 1819, through the wave of Gothic medievalism that swept European literature. Walter Scott and Victor Hugo popularized the dungeon-and-tower aesthetic, and oubliette fit perfectly: a single French word that contained an entire horror story. The word entered English not through legal or military usage but through fiction and tourism.

The word has since become a standard piece of fantasy literature vocabulary. Dungeons and Dragons, video games, and fantasy novels use oubliettes as set pieces. The word has drifted from historical architecture into imagination, which is an appropriate fate for a word that describes a place designed to be lost. The oubliette remembers what it was built to forget.