thé dansant

[tey dahn-sahn]

noun

French.

plural

thés dansants 

1. a tea dance.

thé dansant

/ te dɑ̃sɑ̃ /

noun

1. a dance held while afternoon tea is served, popular in the 1920s and 1930s

Word History and Origins

Origin of thé dansant¹

literally: dancing tea

Example Sentences

There were dresses for a thé dansant, dainty and frosted, in a macaron palette.

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She provided the texts for a series of her brother’s vocal and choral works starting in the 1980s, including a surreally retro setting of her three-poem sequence “A History of the Thé Dansant,” inspired by photographs of their parents from the 1920s.

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She captured the brainy nostalgia of Richard Rodney Bennett’s surreally retro “History of the Thé Dansant,” but best of all were the Gurney songs — “Sleep” followed “Bierside” — performed with moving nobility.

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Indeed, the only other thing he recalled quite distinctly was saying goodbye to her at an afternoon thé dansant in a Brighton hotel.

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Saigon's Cercle Sportif bubbled with the dansant in the hot evenings.

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