There seem to be only two words these days that refer to one of those things that one spends time on while observing, in rotation, short segments of several different channels on TV. One term is sofa , the other couch . There used to be lots more, for example divan chesterfield davenport lounge, and settee The word couch appeared in English before sofa did. At first a couch was a bed, not an elongated, padded chair. This is because the French word that it came from meant to “lie down.”  The Latin ancestor of the French word was collocare and this Latin word in turn was built on two parts that meant “to place together.” It certainly wasn’t the intention as the word developed, but since more than one person can occupy a couch, having evolved from being placed together, the name is appropriate. By 1450 a couch was a couch in English but a sofa was still unheard of. The first citation for sofa came in 1625.  It seems that other European countries that had been dealing with Arabic speakers had been using the word for a little longer since in Arabic a sofa wasn’t so much an article of furniture as a raised part of the floor intended to make sitting more convenient. These built in benches must have been covered in something to make them more comfortable because not only does the first English citation for sofa talk of a rich carpet covering it, the etymology of sofa itself meant “carpet” or “mat,” running back through Arabic and Aramaic. It was 1717 when sofa first meant “couch” according to the Oxford English Dictionary. The New Oxford American Dictionary includes chesterfield as a synonym for couch and sofa but points out that this is principally a Canadian usage. I see from an analysis of Canadians, and their use of this word, that you can roughly predict the age of a Canadian by how familiar they are with the term. Evidently over the past century we Canadians have been adopting couch at about the same rate we have been forgetting chesterfield. Why would anyone have ever called a sofa a chesterfield? There was once an Earldom of Chesterfield but in the 1950s the last Earl died without any kids and so the line came to an end.  During the 1800s though at least one of the Earls must have been quite the swanky guy because (before the days when one could license their name for enormous profit) a style of overcoat appeared called a chesterfield, and then a style of cushy furniture. Today’s episode brought to you by Grammar Girl’s New York Times bestselling book. Look for the link at grammar.quickanddirtytips.com Less