A chifforobe, also chiffarobe or chifferobe, is a closet-like piece of furniture that combines a long space for hanging clothes with a chest of drawers. Typically the wardrobe section runs down one side of the piece, while the drawers occupy the other side. It may have two enclosing doors or have the drawer fronts exposed and a separate door for the hanging space. Chifforobes were first advertised in the 1908 Sears, Roebuck Catalogue, which described them as "a modern invention, having been in use only a short time." The term itself is a portmanteau of the wordschiffonier and wardrobe. The word is used in the United States, primarily in the southern portion of the country, in Puerto Rico, and in Cuba. Its use has been attested as far apart as Georgia and Vermont. In those references, it was used as a water closet or potty. The word has been used in Texas, but is not as common as its synonyms such as bureau or dresser.
In media
"Chiffarobe" appears eleven times in Harper Lee's novel To Kill a Mockingbird. For instance, Tom Robinson "busts up a chiffarobe" for Mayella Ewell.
The 1999 episode of King of the Hill "A Beer Can Named Desire" character Gilbert Fontaine De la Tour D'Haute Rive uses the term chifforobe, and they show the article of furniture.
Hazel Motes, in Flannery O'Connor'sWise Blood, leaves a note on his mother's abandoned "chifforobe" warning thieves will be found and killed.
It also appears repeatedly in Bastard Out of Carolina by Dorothy Allison.
Judith Ortiz Cofer recalled a "monstrous chifforobe" from her youth in Puerto Rico,
The main character Celie in the novelThe Color Purple by Alice Walker describes that patting Harpo feels "like patting another piece of wood. Not a living tree, but a table, a chifferobe." Later in the book, Celie is not happy about the way she looks, and in that context she contemplates: "Nothing but churchgoing clothes in my chifferobe."
In chapter twelve of Thomas Harris's 1988 novel The Silence of the Lambs, Clarice Starling analyses the police deputies at a funeral home in West Virginia and knows that "...they came from houses that had chifforobes instead of closets and she knew pretty much what was in the chifforobes. She knew that these men had relatives who hung their clothes in suitbags on the walls of their trailers."
