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Origin and history of chauffeur

chauffeur(n.)

1896, "a motorist," from French chauffeur, literally "stoker," operator of a steam engine, French nickname for early motorists, from chauffer "to heat," from Old French chaufer "to heat, warm up; to become hot" (see chafe). The first motor-cars were steam-driven. The sense of "professional or paid driver of a private motor car" is from 1902.

The '95 Duryea wagon, which won the Chicago contest last Fall, was exhibited at the Detroit Horse Show last week. Charles B. King, treasurer of the American Motor League, acted as "chauffeur," as the French say. [The Horseless Age, April 1896]

In early 20c. British English shover was a jocular nativized form of the word.

also from 1896

chauffeur(v.)

"convey by car, drive as a chauffeur," 1902, from chauffeur (n.). Related: Chauffeured; chauffeuring.

also from 1902

Entries linking to chauffeur

chafe(v.)

c. 1300, chaufen, "be provoked, grow or be excited;" late 14c. in literal sense of "to make warm, to heat" (also intransitive, "to grow warm or hot"), especially (early 15c.) "to warm by rubbing, excite heat by friction," from Old French chaufer "heat, warm up, become warm" (12c., Modern French chauffer), from Vulgar Latin *calefare, from Latin calefacere "to make hot, make warm," from calere "be warm" (from PIE root *kele- (1) "warm") + facere "to make, do" (from PIE root *dhe- "to set, put").

From 1520s as "abrade the skin by rubbing." Figurative senses from late 14c. include now-obsolete "kindle (joy), inspire, make passionate" as well as "provoke, vex, anger." Related: Chafed; chafing. Chafing-dish is from late 15c.

digraph used in Old French for the "tsh" sound. In some French dialects, including that of Paris (but not that of Picardy), Latin ca- became French "tsha." This was introduced to English after the Norman Conquest, in words borrowed from Old French such as chaste, charity, chief (adj.). Under French influence, -ch- also was inserted into Anglo-Saxon words that had the same sound (such as bleach, chest, church) which in Old English still was written with a simple -c-, and into those that had formerly been spelled with a -c- and pronounced "k" such as chin and much.

As French evolved, the "t" sound dropped out of -ch-, so in later loan-words from French -ch- has only the sound "sh-" (chauffeur, machine (n.), chivalry, etc.).

It turns up as well in words from classical languages (chaos, echo, etc.). Most uses of -ch- in Roman Latin were in words from Greek, which in Greek would be pronounced correctly as /k/ + /h/, as in modern blockhead, but most Romans would have said merely /k/, and this was the regular pronunciation in English. Before c. 1500 such words were regularly spelled with a -c- (Crist, cronicle, scoole), but Modern English has preserved or restored the etymological spelling in most of them (chemical, chorus, monarch).

Sometimes ch- is written to keep -c- hard before a front vowel, as still in modern Italian. In some languages (Welsh, Spanish, Czech) ch- can be treated as a separate letter and words in it are alphabetized after -c- (or, in Czech and Slovak, after -h-). The sound also is heard in words from more distant languages (as in cheetah, chintz), and the digraph also is used to represent the sound in Scottish loch.