10 Words We Stopped Using for Everyday Items

“Timmy, please fetch my pocketbook from the davenport, the one next to the Victrola. And I put your dirty galoshes by the Frigidaire.” If you understood all that, congratulations: You’re fluent in vocabulary from a bygone age. 

Individual words are undoubtedly durable things, often lasting many centuries, but they are not inherently immortal. They can fade away for a multitude of reasons, perhaps not vanishing entirely but rather reaching a point at which they survive only in pockets of the English-speaking world, or are consigned to exist solely in old novels, antique shops, and possibly the minds of our grandparents. Here are 10 such words — relics that were once widely used for everyday items but have now almost entirely slipped out of use. 

At the end of the 1800s, the Cambridge, Massachusetts, furniture manufacturer A.H. Davenport and Company began selling a large upholstered sofa named after the company itself. The model proved so popular that the name “davenport” soon began to be used for similar types of furniture, regardless of the manufacturer. The company closed in 1973, at which point the term began to fade from general use — replaced by “couch” and “sofa.” However, it’s still commonly used in New England and the Midwest, particularly among older generations. 

The word “dungaree” has a long history, beginning in the 17th century with a cheap, coarse cotton cloth traded from India to Europe. “Dungaree” was the Anglicized version of the Hindi dũgrī and Urdu dungrī, names for the fabric. By the mid-19th century the plural “dungarees” had emerged, in reference to robust work clothes made from the aforementioned cloth. The word then found its way to America, where it was used to refer to blue dungaree or denim trousers, overalls, and uniforms, including those worn by sailors in the U.S. Navy from 1913 all the way up to 1999. Through the 18th and 19th centuries, the global spread of “dungarees” led to different regional meanings. In British English, for example, “dungarees” refers to the denim garment with a chest bib and shoulder straps (what Americans call overalls), while in the U.S. it became synonymous with “jeans” — and ultimately “jeans” won out, making “dungarees” largely obsolete in America. 

Back in the 1940s, people were still using eggs and flat beer to condition their hair, normally after using detergent-based shampoos that made hair frizzy and static-prone. By the end of the decade, the first mass-market crème rinse (or cream rinse) was developed, providing a new way to detangle and soften hair. “Crème rinse” remained a popular term for a variety of conditioners up until the 1980s, when 2-in-1 convenience formulas were developed under the name “hair conditioner.” This latter term became a catchall name, demoting “crème rinse” to a more niche realm of the hair care industry.  

The word “galoshes” has a history that stretches all the way back to medieval England, possibly in reference to a wooden shoe or sandal fastened to the foot, or to a shoe or boot in general. By the 1600s, the word had shifted to refer to an overshoe worn to protect regular shoes from rain, mud, and snow. This meaning stuck and is still used — especially by older people — in parts of the Northeastern and Midwestern United States. But younger Americans rarely use the word, typically preferring “rain boots,” “snow boots,” or just plain “boots.”

“Counterpane” comes from “counterpoint,” itself derived from the French contrepointe, meaning “a quilted mattress or cover for a bed.” The word has been used in Britain since at least the 17th century and also crossed the pond to America, perhaps most famously appearing as the title of the fourth chapter — “The Counterpane” — of Herman Melville’s 1851 masterpiece, Moby-Dick. Today, however, “counterpane” is rarely heard outside of museums, period dramas, and classic literature, having been replaced by words such as “bedspread,” “comforter,” and “quilt.” 

When William Durant, an executive of General Motors, invested in a struggling refrigerator maker in 1918, he gave it a new name: Frigidaire. The company became so successful, and its refrigerators so popular, that many Americans began calling any refrigerator, regardless of its actual brand, a Frigidaire. It was the same kind of linguistic brand genericization that occurred with Kleenex, Band-Aid, and Jacuzzi — but in the case of Frigidaire, it didn’t last. Frigidaire still exists as a brand (now owned by the Electrolux Group), but most Americans say “refrigerator” or “fridge” to refer to the common kitchen appliance. 

In 1906, the Victor Talking Machine Company launched the Victrola, a stylish phonograph that hid its mechanical horn inside a wooden floor cabinet. It was so popular that the brand name became a generic word for record players. But the rapid expansion of the radio market undercut the Victrola’s popularity, and by the end of the 1920s the phonograph was in decline — as was the generic use of “Victrola,” which was dropped in favor of “record player” and “turntable.” 

In the early 1600s, a pocketbook (or pocket book) was literally a small book that fit in a pocket. By the early 1800s, the meaning had somehow morphed to also include a woman’s purse or handbag. This was especially true in America, where the term stuck and is still used in parts of the country today, mainly among older people in the Northeastern and Southern regions of the U.S. But for many Americans, “pocketbook” sounds antiquated, and “purse” or “handbag” is more common. (The British don’t use “pocketbook” at all, except for actual books or notepads.) 

Many pomade brands emerged in Europe toward the end of the 1800s, with one of the first and most popular being Brilliantine, a hairstyling product made by the French perfumer Ed Pinaud. The perfumed, oily dressing — which gave men’s hair, beards, and mustaches a glossy finish — caught on in America, and “Brilliantine” became a common catchall word to refer to pomades until the 1950s, when newer products, including Brylcreem, pushed the old name aside. 

The term “high-fidelity” first appeared in the 1930s to describe the sound quality of radio receivers. But it was in the 1950s that “high-fidelity” became a marketing buzzword for equipment meant to reproduce sound faithfully, at which point the shortened “hi-fi” was adopted to refer to home music systems, displacing the older “phonograph” and “record player.” Then stereophonic sound arrived, and by the 1960s and ’70s stereo systems ruled the market — and most people stopped saying “hi-fi” in favor of “stereo.” Some people still use the old terminology, but if you tell a Zoomer that you’re “listening to Nickelback on your hi-fi,” you run the risk of seriously dating yourself.