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Bourbon

proper nouncommon in dialogue

  • //ˈbʊə(ɹ).bən//
  • //ˈbɔː(ɹ).bən//
  • //ˈbɜː(ɹ).bən//

A European dynasty which reigns in Spain and formerly ruled the Kingdom of France.

proper noun

  1. 1

    A European dynasty which reigns in Spain and formerly ruled the Kingdom of France.

  2. 2

    A surname from French.

  3. 3

    historicalA Bourbon Democrat.

    It was "a fundamental impossibility" for a black person to be a Bourbon, white-supremacist Democrat, but a black individual could very well become a "progressive Democrat."

    1992, West's Federal Supplement (first series), vol. 787, p. 1090. As a practical matter, blacks had been denied a fair vote and a fair count even before the 1901 Constitution, because the Black Belt Bourbon white politicians used fraud and intimidation to manipulate the black vote to support conservative Democratic candidates.

  4. 4

    historicalA Bourbon Democrat. A white conservative, particularly in the context of opposition to equal rights for black people.

    For the Bourbon White elite and their allies, the intimidation of the Black laborers and farmers was necessary to prevent their political involvement and to maintain their subjugated location in the economy.

  5. 5

    A county in Kentucky, see Bourbon County.

  6. 6

    A street in New Orleans, Louisiana; in full, Bourbon Street.

  7. 7

    obsoleteThe island of Réunion.

  8. 8

    A town in Indiana.

  9. 9

    A city in Missouri.

Etymology

The French Bourbon dynasty is named for the lordship of Bourbon l'Archambault. The town's name derives from Gaulish Borvo, a local Celtic deity associated with hot springs, from Proto-Celtic *borvo (“froth, foam”), from Proto-Indo-European *bʰrewh₁- (“to be hot, boil”). Compare brew and fervent. The subsidiary senses derive from the dynasty's name.

The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).