Chaise longue and chaise lounge

Chaise longues — those reclining full-length chairs that beckon you to the beach — are making me nostalgic. Not for days when I had more free time and closer proximity to the ocean, but for days when all the editing rules I learned were still relevant. Editing rules like: It’s chaise longue, not chaise lounge.

The nostalgia hit me recently when I read this sentence about digital nomads in the New York Times Magazine: “Then, from a chaise longue on the beach, they can register a business with the tap of a button.”

Outside the New York Times, “longue” sightings are rare these days. More and more, I see “chaise lounge” instead. That’s not necessarily a problem. But when you’re a longtime copy editor who once believed that editing rules were universal and people who knew them were uniquely valuable, it’s hard to let go.

Apparently, some editing bigwig at the New York Times feels the same way. “Chaise longue” appears in their pages about three or four times a month. The only recent instances of “chaise lounge” appear in the proper name of some product that spells it that way.

This can get a little awkward, like in the Times’ 2019 article “Shopping for a Chaise Longue” that lists five chaise longues named “chaise lounge,” sometimes with both spellings appearing in the same sentence. It’s the kind of tug-of-war between old and new that we editors see a lot. “Healthy” and “healthful” are another example. Read about both in my recent column.

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