faubourgn.

Etymology: late Middle English faubourg, fabo(u)r, < French faubourg. From the 15th cent. to the beginning of the 17th cent. the word was more or less naturalized, especially in Scotland; it is now used only as foreign, with French pronunciation or (more frequently) semi-anglicized as /ˈfəʊbʊə(r)/, /-bʊəɡ/. Littré considers faubourg, formerly also spelt faux-bourg (= ‘false borough’) to be a corruption of the earlier-recorded synonym forsbourg ( < fors outside + bourg borough), which is the source of some of the English forms given above. The word faubourg, faux-bourg, seems not to be known in French before 15th cent., but its existence in 1380 is implied by Latin falsus burgus in a charter cited by Du Cange. Its origin may possibly be found in the Middle High German phâlburgere (also spelt falborgere), which according to German scholars originally meant ‘burghers of the pale’, i.e. ‘persons living outside the city wall but within the palisade’; it afterwards denoted a special class of non-resident burghers, having only partial civic rights. The word occurs frequently in the imperial charters of 13–14th cent., sometimes latinized as phalburgenses; and a charter of 1365, according to a French translation given by Laguille (1727) speaks of ‘des faux bourgeois dits en allemand Pfalbourguers’. From these facts it seems not unlikely that faubourg, faux-bourg, may have been evolved < phalburgensis or its punning translation falsus burgensis, faux bourgeois.