Chateau Cardboard
- noun
- /ʃæˈtoʊ kɑːrˈbɔrd/
- Slang
:
casa de cartón
- Even though their Chateau Cardboard was tiny and old, they made it feel like home.
Examples
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After he lost his job, Mark had to move into a Chateau Cardboard on the edge of town.
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They threw a party at their new place, jokingly calling it Chateau Cardboard.
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He lives in a Chateau Cardboard.
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Is this really a Chateau Cardboard?
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After he lost his job, Mark had to move into a Chateau Cardboard on the edge of town.
-
They threw a party at their new place, jokingly calling it Chateau Cardboard.
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Even though their Chateau Cardboard was tiny and old, they made it feel like home.
Synonyms
61
7.4
A casual word for a home often meaning a small apartment
10
9.1
A very cheap place that rents small rooms to people with little money and is often in bad condition
A small cramped apartment often poorly built and uncomfortable
Antonyms
Surface Forms
Morphology
The compound pairs the literal constituents 'chateau' (a grand house) and 'cardboard' (cheap, flimsy material), so a learner who knows both words can infer an ironic or sarcastic meaning: a grand-sounding label for a shabby place. However, the sense relies on pragmatic irony and creative metaphor rather than a routine compositional pattern, so understanding requires inference beyond straightforward word combination.
Etymology
Chateau Cardboard may come from a funny image: the word chateau means a big, grand house or castle, and cardboard is thin, cheap material. So people call a small or run-down home a Chateau Cardboard as a joke, and that is why it means 'a cheap, shabby place to live'.