Other forms: salons
A salon is a shop where hair or beauty treatments are given. A hair salon, a nail salon, book at the salon.
Hairdresser and hairdressing salon are the fuller British terms. The historical sense is quite different: a salon was a regular gathering at a private house where writers and thinkers talked, hosted usually by a woman, and the eighteenth-century Paris salons shaped a good deal of European thought. The Salon, capitalised, was also the official French art exhibition. Note saloon, which is a different word for a bar or a car body style.
1nounsalonA shop where hair or beauty treatments are given.
“The salon has been on that corner since about 1988.”
2nounregularA regular gathering of writers and thinkers.
“Her salon met every Thursday for about twenty years.”
salon is a shop or gathering.
Italian salone means a large hall, from a Germanic word for a room. The reception room gave its name to the gathering held in it, and the gathering's name later attached to a hairdresser's shop.
Proto-Indo-European
*sel- — human settlement, village, dwelling
Proto-Germanic
*salą — dwelling, house, hall
lng
sala — room, house, entrance hall
Italian
salone — large hall
French
salon — reception room
English, today
salon
Built from
French salon (“reception room”), from Middle French -, from Italian salone (“large hall”), augmented form of sala (“hall”), from lng sala (“room, house, entrance hall”), from Proto-Germanic salą (“dwelling, house, hall”), from Proto-Indo-European sel- (“human settlement, village, dwelling”). Cognate with Old High German sal (“room, house, entrance hall”), Old English sæl (“room, hall, castle”), cu село (“courtyard, village”), Lithuanian sala (“island”). a doublet of saloon.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA