bourrée
Americannoun
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bourrées
plural
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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
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
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
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
He tries out moves, including the bourrées of a ballerina.
From New York Times ● May 15, 2013
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.
