Settee, Sofa or Couch? UK Regional Usage Mapped From 5,000 Survey Responses

Settee, sofa and couch describe the same piece of furniture and carry three entirely different histories: sofa from the Arabic suffah by way of Turkish and French, couch from the French coucher meaning to lie down, and settee from the English settle, a high backed wooden bench. Our 2026 report traces those journeys, explains how a neutral choice of vocabulary became a class marker through the U and non U framing popularised by Nancy Mitford in the nineteen fifties, and describes the regional tendency everyone recognises without pretending to have mapped it. We publish no regional percentages, because we ran no fieldwork and know of no citable published dataset covering these terms by UK region. What we do set out is the vocabulary that genuinely changes an order, including chesterfield, chaise, day bed and corner sofa handing. Furniture in Fashion publishes this as editorial and etymological analysis....