In about the middle of the 1700s in England, two architectural styles became very popular. One was gothic, and the other could be best described as sort of fake Chinese. That is, buildings, bridges, and the like were designed to look like they were from China, to people who had never been to China. In those days, not too differently from now, an architectural style was often popularized in books of patterns, designs, and instructions.
One of the people who seems to have had a fair amount of influence in popularizing the Chinese style was a self-described “architect and carpenter” named William Halfpenny. Although some buildings can be attributed to him — and especially a “Chinese bridge” in Croome Park, Worcestershire, which has recently been recreated as part of a restoration project — his real influence came from the books he wrote about building designs, including “Rural Architecture in the Chinese Taste” (1750) and “New Designs for Chinese Temples” (1752).
One thing we know for sure about William Halfpenny is that he never visited China. There are some lingering mysteries about him, though. One is whether his name was really William Halfpenny. Another author of architectural tomes at the time, Batty Langley, referred to William in one of his books as “Michael Hoare”. Some of Halfpenny’s books say that they’re authored by William and his son John Halfpenny — but there’s some doubt about whether John Halfpenny really existed, or if he did, whether he was really William’s son. But the mystery we’re most interested in here has to do with something in the book “New Designs for Chinese Temples,” because it’s the first place in the world that the word “gazebo” appeared.
A gazebo is a little building in a garden or park that you can sit in and look at the scenery. At least that’s what it is today. In Halfpenny’s time, it was more likely to be part of a larger building; a sitting room located so that it had a good view of the grounds. It was a feature of the “new Chinese temple” designs, and starting in the 1750s, gazebos became extremely popular.
Probably because the designs in the book were supposed to look Chinese (they don’t, particularly), everyone assumed that “gazebo” was a Chinese word, or at least based on one. But that doesn’t seem to be the case; nobody has ever found anything even remotely like “gazebo” in any Chinese language. So where did it come from?
The best guess is that Halfpenny, whover he was, simply made up the word. Since a “gazebo” is a place to look at the scenery, maybe they started with the word “gaze.” In the 1700s, a good education would have included a large dose of Latin, so they might have realized that “-ebo” added to “gaze” is something you might add to a Latin word to change it in to future tense — so that maybe “gazebo” was supposed to mean “I will look”, or something like that. They might have been copying Latin words that they already knew, such as “lavabo” (“I will wash”, which is a word used in a Roman Catholic mass) or “videbo” (“I will see”).
We’ll probably never know exactly where “gazebo” came from. But even if that was solved, we’d still be faced with a mystery. Nobody knows where “gaze” came from, either.
