The Collaborative International Dictionary
Bureau \Bu"reau\, n.; pl. E. Bureaus, F. Bureaux. [F. bureau a writing table, desk, office, OF., drugget, with which a writing table was often covered, equiv. to F. bure, and fr. OF. buire dark brown, the stuff being named from its color, fr. L. burrus red, fr. Gr. ? flame-colored, prob. fr. ? fire. See Fire, n., and cf. Borel, n.]
Originally, a desk or writing table with drawers for papers.
--Swift.The place where such a bureau is used; an office where business requiring writing is transacted.
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Hence: A department of public business requiring a force of clerks; the body of officials in a department who labor under the direction of a chief.
Note: On the continent of Europe, the highest departments, in most countries, have the name of bureaux; as, the Bureau of the Minister of Foreign Affairs. In England and America, the term is confined to inferior and subordinate departments; as, the ``Pension Bureau,'' a subdepartment of the Department of the Interior. [Obs.] In Spanish, bureo denotes a court of justice for the trial of persons belonging to the king's household.
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A chest of drawers for clothes, especially when made as an ornamental piece of furniture. [U.S.]
Bureau system. See Bureaucracy.
Bureau Veritas, an institution, in the interest of maritime underwriters, for the survey and rating of vessels all over the world. It was founded in Belgium in 1828, removed to Paris in 1830, and re["e]stablished in Brussels in 1870.
Wiktionary
WordNet
See bureau
n. an administrative unit of government; "the Central Intelligence Agency"; "the Census Bureau"; "Office of Management and Budget"; "Tennessee Valley Authority" [syn: agency, federal agency, government agency, office, authority]
furniture with drawers for keeping clothes [syn: chest of drawers, chest, dresser]
[also: bureaux (pl)]
Usage examples of "bureaux".
I think, perhaps, that she does ring up bureaux and ask for shorthand typists to come.
There is clearly some irresponsible person about who has got some kind of—what do they call it nowadays—a fixture or a complex—about shorthand typists or secretarial bureaux.
TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED To all Party bureaux: Revisionism and backsliding has been noted with concern in the following Departments .
In old times, there were too many clerks in the bureaux relatively to the work.
Cambon, accordingly, in spite of the Jacobins, retains in his bureaux all whom he can among veteran officials.
Save about "twenty of them," all who are not to succeed in entering the new Corps Legislatif, will intrigue for offices in Paris and become "state messengers, employees in bureaux, and ushers to ministers.
Although the Jacobins at Nevers, Mâcon and elsewhere, have forcibly expelled officers legally elected from their bureaux, and stained the hall with their blood,[49] "out of 84 departments 66 elected a plurality of electors from among the anti-republicans, eight being neither good nor bad, while only ten remained loyal to the Jacobins.
The representatives are arrested in their committee-rooms or domiciles, or pursued, tracked and hunted down, while the rest of their opponents, notables, officers, heads of bureaux, journalists, former ministers and directors, Barthélémy and Carnot, are treated in the same way.
The things that were neither bureaux, beds, bags, boxes, baskets nor bibelot-tables could usually be described as big, black, brown or buhl or, at a pinch, as being bedroom or boudoir furniture, and since every shelf, drawer and pigeonhole in every object was crammed full of newspaper-cuttings, letters and assorted souvenirs, the searchers soon found their heads, legs and backs aching with effort.
At times one might have thought it an ordinary sitting in one of the bureaux of the Assembly.
Then came the Bureaux of Propaganda by Television, by Feeling Picture, and by Synthetic Voice and Music respectivelytwenty-two floors of them.
But the Notables, in the true spirit of priests and nobles, combining together against the people, have voted by 5 bureaux out of 6.
The bureaux are to assemble together to consolidate their separate votes.
The newspapers, the telegraph lines and pneumatic tube-ways, the palaces and barracks and bureaux!
And when reports came from our bureaux, hinting, requesting, then demanding the right to eliminate the enemies of England, it was I who read them, I who covertly weighed lives in the balance, and I who signed your name, while you ate and drank and joked with those men you called your friends.