Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
1840, from obsolete French à bric et à brac (16c.) "at random, any old way," a nonsense phrase.
Wiktionary
n. Small ornaments and other miscellaneous items of little value.
n. (alternative spelling of bric-a-brac English)
WordNet
n. miscellaneous curios [syn: knickknack, nicknack, knickknackery, whatnot]
Wikipedia
Bric-à-brac or bric-a-brac (origin French), first used in the Victorian era, refers to lesser objets d'art forming collections of curios, such as elaborately decorated teacups and small vases, compositions of feathers or wax flowers under glass domes, decorated eggshells, porcelain figurines, painted miniatures or photographs in stand-up frames, and so on.
In middle-class homes bric-à-brac was used as ornament on mantelpieces, tables, and shelves, or was displayed in curio cabinets: sometimes these cabinets have glass doors to display the items within while protecting them from dust. Today, "bric-à-brac" refers to a selection of items of modest value, often sold in street markets.
Edith Wharton and Ogden Codman, Jr., in The Decoration of Houses (1897), distinguished three gradations of quality in such "household ornaments": bric-à-brac, bibelots (trinkets) and objets d'art.
Bric-a-Brac is a British children's television series devised by Michael Cole and Nick Wilson, and starring well known children's television presenter Brian Cant. It was produced by the BBC and originally ran from 1 October until 5 November 1980, with another series from 18 August to 29 September 1982. It was repeated frequently until 1989.
The programme was set in a fictitious junk shop, with its shopkeeper played by Cant, who would deliver a monologue to camera. Each episode centred on a particular letter of the alphabet, with different items beginning with that letter found and discussed by the shopkeeper. Cant's script made heavy use of alliteration, and made use of tongue-twisters. At the end of each episode, he would wind up and set off a traditional clockwork toy, upon which the camera would focus whilst the credits rolled.
Usage examples of "bric-a-brac".
When the young lady had been put into the carriage, and the jobbed brougham had disappeared down the Rue Charlot, Brunner talked bric-a-brac to Pons, and Pons talked marriage.
He recalled the pensions he and Jenny had stayed in when they first arrived, over a year ago: the faded and unmatched wallpaper, the dusty bric-a-brac, the chipped china, the hinges crying for oil.
There were also piles and piles of mass produced bric-a-brac for the tourist trade: overpriced feathered masks, plastic krewe doubloons from Mardi Gras past, rubber crawfish keyrings, suitably primitive-looking voodoo dolls that came with pins included.
A narrow income, combined with a passion for bric-a-brac, condemned him to a regimen so abhorrent to a discriminating palate, that, bachelor as he was, he had cut the knot of the problem by dining out every day.
Good cheer and bric-a-brac gave him the small change for the love which could spend itself in no other way.
So, as slaves must work hard, and the Queen of Ev and her children were delicate and tender, I transformed them all into articles of ornament and bric-a-brac and scattered them around the various rooms of my palace.
He has been to America and he has been contaminated by the cheap idealism of the Americans, contaminated by the ubiquitous bathtub, the five-and-ten-cent store bric-a-brac, the bustle, the efficiency, the machinery, the high wages, the free libraries, etc.
Her hold was now full of an assortment of ropes, screens, fake treasure chests, feather-light swords, and an eclectic collection of bric-a-brac furniture ranging from ornate ancient chairs to stools some showperson might just have stolen from an ultramodern bar somewhere.
She still weighed a lot less than the Sprites, and she'd spotted a high shelf full of obviously very precious bric-a-bracs.
Instead the glass and bric-a-brac with which the Sprites filled every spare corner had been carelessly swept together.
The rooms were artfully Spartan with a many-room Colonial compacture that made them cozy even for all the lack of bric-a-brac.
Along the wall opposite stood an open cabinet divided into junk-filled cubbyholes, much of it reminiscent of the stuff in Pillbody's shop --bric-a-brac mostly, travel souvenirs and keepsakes.
The seaside house is decorated with telco decals, chunks of driftwood, and the basic bric-a-brac of a hippie crash-pad.
Well, it wasn’t really a bookstore anymore -- it still had a couple of tall cases of books, but the rest of the store was a bricolage of bric-a-brac, from plumbing fittings to football helmets.
There were spare till rolls and boxes of glasses on a shelf above Bothwell's head, framed cowboy posters stacked against a wall, bric-a-brac and debris like everything had just spilled out of a collision at a car boot sale.