A Thèque-nical Vocabulary Lesson

Bibliothèque  must surely have been one of the words on the vocabulary list for my beginner's French course when I was 12. The second year that I lived in France, I borrowed books and CDs from the médiathèque. In Italy, I learned the meaning of pinacoteca, and by extension, pinacothèque, and since living in Paris I have been to exhibitions at the cinemathèque. But it took pregnancy, an unexpected contact with an infectious disease, and a consultation with a midwife who was also not a native French speaker to teach me that the sérothèque is the place where a medical laboratory stores blood samples after they have been analysed. So if you ever need a "historical" blood test, in my case where they check whether antibodies were present before a more recent exposure to a disease, the lab can take out one of your old samples and analyse it for other things.

I was quite tickled by the idea of a lending library of blood samples, so I did a quick search to find out if there were other -thèque words missing from my vocabulary, and it turns out that the French Wiktionary has a whole list of them. A glyptothèque is a museum of engraved stones, joujouthèque is Quebec French for a collection of games, a candidathèque is a store of CVs, and a carothèque is not a collection of carrots, but a place to keep carottes glaciares, or ice samples from a glacier.

Maybe over the long weekend I'll amuse myself by seeing how many of these new words I can drop into conversation with my in-laws :-)