poubelle (French)
Where does "poubelle" come from?
French poubelle comes directly from the surname Poubelle, after Eugène Poubelle, the prefect of the Seine. In 1884, he issued a rule requiring Paris apartments to keep trash containers, and his name soon became the ordinary word for those bins. From there, poubelle also came to mean the rubbish itself.
Full etymology tree
- poubelle (French), 'rubbish bin, garbage can'
- derived from Poubelle (French), 'a surname'
Descendants and derived words
- camion poubelle (French)
- poub (French)
Updated April 2026
Etymology data from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0 · About Miraris