bourrée
Americannoun
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an old French and Spanish dance, somewhat like a gavotte.
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the music for it.
noun
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a traditional French dance in fast duple time, resembling a gavotte
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a piece of music composed in the rhythm of this dance
Other Word Forms
Noun Inflected Forms
Etymology
Origin of bourrée
1700–10; < French: literally, bundle of brushwood, originally, the twigs with which the bundle was stuffed (the dance may once have been done around brushwood bonfires); noun use of past participle (feminine) of bourrer to stuff, fill, verbal derivative of bourre hair, fluff < Late Latin burra wool, coarse fabric
Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
See Examples For:
One by one, they re-enter the stage; the first, Cassie Mey, performs bourrée steps on demi-point as her arms rise and fall behind her back like wings.
From New York Times ● Oct. 27, 2012
And she went on shaking her head, while the kitchen-maid—the one who danced the bourrée, and was now listlessly rinsing glasses innumerable—giggled behind her mistress's back.
From Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine by Barker, Edward Harrison
A little higher, and I passed a pair of men in a tree with pruning-hooks, and one of them was singing the music of a bourrée.
From The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 1 (of 25) by Lang, Andrew
She fills the space with an array of battements and bourrées, chaîné turns and arabesques; at one point she skips up a spiral staircase like a happy child.
From The Wall Street Journal ● May 20, 2026
And as much as the dancers reach out for one another — with a splayed hand shooting forward, or bourrées contracting backward — we also see their wholeness as individuals.
From New York Times ● Jun. 24, 2022
Her delicate Odette held arabesques for impossibly long moments, Rausch’s tiny bourrées offstage executed with such precision that she appeared to float in a cloud of mist.
From Seattle Times ● Apr. 19, 2022
In utter silence, she stands up and faces the back wall, rises slowly onto relevé and bourrées backward, her arms wafting behind her.
From New York Times ● Oct. 22, 2014
From week's end to week's end it was one continuous gala in Monastier; people spent the day in the wine-shops, and the drum or the bagpipes led on the bourrées up to ten at night.
From The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 1 (of 25) by Lang, Andrew
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
