Word.ws English Dictionary

ronds-de-cuir

ronds-de-cuir is the plural of rond-de-cuir.

Meaning of rond-de-cuir

Noun

rond-de-cuir (plural ronds-de-cuir)

  1. A French bureaucrat or functionary; an office worker.
    • In 1893, Georges Courteline immortalised France's petty bureaucrats in a satirical novel called Messieurs les Ronds-de-Cuir, after the leather cushions that civil servants sat on. The "ronds-de-cuir" are still ridiculed and detested. Like Courteline's bureaucrats, the tormentors of the préfecture...2013 March 11, Lara Marlowe, “Magic of living in Paris punctures pain of endless French bureaucracy”, in The Irish Times
  2. (colloquial, derogatory) A pen-pusher.

Questions about ronds-de-cuir

What is ronds-de-cuir the plural of?
Ronds-de-cuir is the plural of rond-de-cuir.

Words near ronds-de-cuir in the dictionary

  1. rondorfite
  2. rondos
  3. Rondout
  4. ronds
  5. ronds de jambe
  6. ronds-de-cuir
  7. rondure
  8. rondures
  9. Rondônia
  10. Rone
  11. rone pipe

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: ronds-de-cuir (page history and authors); rond-de-cuir (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “ronds-de-cuir.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/ronds-de-cuir. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.