Bloomsberries
noun · first attested 20th century
A London district that was cheap and unfashionable gave its name to a byword for highbrow.
The members of the Bloomsbury Group of English writers, artists and thinkers.
51.5231°N -0.1250°W · Q150120
Record
- Relationship
- Named from the place
- Confidence
- Well attestedThe place link is the standard scholarly account.
- Attested
- 20th century
- Part of speech
- noun
Explanations here are written for this atlas. Dictionary text is not copied; the sources are linked so the claim can be checked.
- Step 1
Bloomsbury
- In English
Bloomsberries
Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell, John Maynard Keynes, Lytton Strachey and their circle began meeting around 1905 in Bloomsbury, the area around the British Museum, then out of fashion and full of large, affordable houses. Bloomsberries is the jokey plural for them, punning on berries. The district's name goes back to Blemondisberi, the manor of William Blemond, who held the land in the early thirteenth century.