Hello everyone,

Is "clothes press" a rather obsolete term for a wardrobe or clothes closet?

Thanks for the help

I have never heard this used in the Northeast US. We would say closet, dresser, wardrobe etc.
If I didn't look it up, I would have assumed it to be another word for iron.

Yes Dante, it is an obsolete term for somewhere to keep clothes. At a rough guess 100 years obsolete!

Thank you for the answers christine and BobinWales.

I never heard of ''clothes press'' either but a quick Google pulls it up in shopping, persons apparently are still trying to sell them. Further down the page is descriptions and definitions.

Dante, We Wordwizards like to quickly resolve pressing problems.
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Ken – July 25, 2010

That joke needs a little more steam.....;-)

And some of WWs occasionally enjoy poking fun at poor ESL learners :)

Dante, The only CLOTHES PRESS I'm familiar with is the one that dry cleaning and laundering businesses use for pressing clothes. It’s that ironing board sandwich affair which gives off a shot of steam (a la Christine) when the top portion comes down to do its press.

After supplying my previous wise-ass posting, I actually looked it up and found the following (however, they really should say something like, ‘rarely used today‘, but they don't):

Here's the short and sweet definition offered by the OXFORD ENGLISH DICTIONARY:

CLOTHES-PRESS [[CLOTHES PRESS, CLOTHESPRESS]] [from PRESS, which was a cupboard for clothes (1371)].

1) A receptacle for clothes; properly a shelved recess or movable chest or case in which clothes are kept folded; but also sometimes applied to a wardrobe in which they are hung up unfolded.

2) An apparatus for pressing various textile fabrics.
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The DICTIONARY OF AMERICAN REGIONAL ENGLISH goes into excruciating detail on CLOTHESPRESS in the equivalent of a full 8½ x 11 page. But I won't subject you to that kind of pain:

b]CLOTHESPRESS[/b]:

1) [1773]: A piece of furniture for storing clothing: A wardrobe, shelved cabinet, or chest of drawers. [[Its precise meaning varied from state to state. In some places it contained both drawers and hanging space; in others it just contained shelves on which clothes were placed flat; and in some cases it was built into the wall. But today it is mostly considered old-fashioned]]

2) [1903] Transferred : A clothes closet [[‘small dark from where clothing is hung’; ‘a built-in space in a room for hanging clothes.’]]
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Ken – July 25, 2010 (hard-pressed to say any more than I have)

.. what goes around comes back to where it started .. well generally speaking .. my acquaintence with press as a cupboard stems mainly from hearing linen press .. so I dutifully googled it to see what else I could reveal and lo and behold Ken there you were all googled out and ready to be clicked .. back in Nov 2004 you answered an enquiry from Hannah C from Exmouth WA, Aus .. and put a Kiwi in his place .. but the most telling part was end of the thread .... followed by .. ... now I wonder who those two could be ??????

WoZ totally impressed

I'm imPRESSed with how long you kept the press bit up!!

I suppose that the authorities on antique-furniture terminology (if not antique furniture terminology) would be antiques experts rather than linguists.
Without citing references, I'll say that I've come across two very distinct types of case-pieces (furniture with a carcase) labelled as linen presses:

(a) a wardrobe usually with one, two or three courses of drawers under the cupboard section/s; the term seems to be far more common in the US than the UK

(b) a lowish chest-of-drawers with an actual mechanical press bolted on top; this usage is far less common - a trawl through Google Images will turn up one or two examples eventually.