Bonbon

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. A small, often chocolate-coated confection filled with sweet cream or fruit
2. A type of sweet treat that typically consists of a flavored center encased in chocolate
3. An individually wrapped candy that is usually enjoyed as a dessert or snack

Etymology: The word is a playful doubling of a very ordinary French adjective. French "bon" means "good," and speakers repeated it, "bon bon," to make something sound especially pleasing, the way English speakers might say "good-good" to a child. Reduplication of this kind is a common way of making a word cute or emphatic, and the French coinage produced a term for a sweet treat that was, quite literally, "good good." The French doubling was borrowed into English as "bonbon," and the surface sense of "good" has stayed attached to the candy ever since. The chain of ancestry behind "bon" is long: it goes back through Old French and Middle French to Latin "bonus," which descends from much older forms in Old Latin and Archaic Latin, the earliest recorded stages of the language. So the candy's name rests on a word that has meant "good" for well over two thousand years, now doubled into a sweet.

Synonyms: candy, sweet, confection, treat, delicacy