One word for cupboard used mainly in Hiberno and Scottish English is press. When I encountered it in one of my Irish courses as a translation of the Irish word prios it puzzled me somewhat as I’d never come across this word used to mean cupboard before. Today I spotted the term linen press in a book I’m reading and thought I’d find out more about this word.
According to the OED, a press is a large cupboard, usually with shelves, especially one that lives in a wall recess, and is used to store such things as linen, clothes, books, crockery and other kitchen item. It is sometimes referred to as a clothes-press or linen-press. It comes from the French word presse, which originally referred to a crowd or crush in battle, and by the 14th century also meant a clothes cupboard.
Do you call cupboards presses, or have you heard anybody doing so?
I did not realize this before, but now books I’ve read make sense! I wondered why people were putting things away in a press… This is not something one hears in Canada, at least not in the area I live in.
When I first came to Edinburgh I came across the “Edinburgh press” in some of the older flats I visited. It is indeed a very shallow cupboard behind a door which looks just like the door to a room.
In Australia it is about as common as the alternative of linen cupboard used for storage of sheets, towels, doonahs etc.
I have never heard “press” to mean cupboard, and I had to look up the word “doonah” 🙂
I had a colleague from Dublin who used it for a Polish office cabinet (sort of like the linked picture but a lot bigger, about 8 feet tall)
http://www.wholesaleofficefurniture.co.uk/images/office-furniture-storage/office-storage-cabinet-160l.jpg
Being somewhat Danish, I understood the word “doonah” without having to look it up, but I’ve never heard an English speaker use it before. I love it.
I first heard ‘press’ for cupboard in the West of Ireland. I mentioned it to my dad, who spent his teenage years in Bradford (having arrived from Berlin in 1939) and he remembers hearing it there. I read (or heard) somewhere that it originally referred specifically to a unit for storing linen, wherein the linen would be stacked and hence pressed flat. Nowadays in Ireland, however, it is used to refer to any kind of cupboard.
It was the usual word for a cupboard in Northern Ireland where I grew up in the 1970s. When I learned Irish language in school, the word sounded the same, so I always knew/assumed that was the origin.