What is a Chesterfield to a Canadian?

It means sofa or couch but i call it a couch

Well... from what I remember the chesterfield was a british name for a couch/sofa as safecraker said, named after a duke or town in jolly 'ole england. But we adopted the name, we rarely use that term now.
A quick search on google gives a football (soccer)team and many American towns with the name, presumably named after the same royal influence.

In Canada, a Chesterfield is a sofa that converts to a bed.

Umm...I never heard those types called anything but sofa beds.

Chesterfields are a particular kind of sofa. They are leather rather than fabric. They are heavily padded and characterized by deep-set buttons causing a pillowy effect on the backrest and sometimes the seat of the sofa.
There are also Chesterfield chairs, but sofas are the norm.

Named after a town in Britain where they were made.

When I was growing up, we called all sofas/couches chesterfields, rather than sofas or couches. It seems to me that some of the older people in the neighbourhood called the same piece of furniture a chesterfield sofa.

a term for a sofa, especially a large one with upholstered arms, was probably brought down from Canada, where it is common. In the United States, it was largely limited to the trade region of San Francisco in northern California. According to Craig M. Carver in American Regional Dialects, the word probably comes from the name of a 19th-century earl of Chesterfield and originally referred "specifically to a couch with upright armrests at either end." It appears to have come into use in Canada around 1903 and in northern California at about the same time.

i remember when we bought our first sofa in 1957 (oh, oh!) we bought a CHESTERFIELD from the eaton's catalog - and it was a sofa where you pulled on the front and the back flipped down to form a kind of sofa bed with a ridge in the middle - not very comfortable to sleep on. it was relegated to rec room duty after a few years and eventually wound up in a friends hunting camp. the chipmunks converted it into a lovenest and baby-bed after a few more years and pulled out the stuffing! poor old chesterfield; it sure gave service for a long time. hbg

FROM THE SAME EARL . . .
From the same Earl of Chesterfield: a single-breasted or double-breasted semi-fitted overcoat with velvet collar.

The Chesterfield davenport (sofa) usually has "upright armrests" (whatever that means).

I wanted to list the coat definition because once-upon-a-year I owned one (in the Western U.S.) and that was the terminology the salesperson used. Sure enough, it's the No. 1 definition listed in Merriam-Webster's Collegiate. :-) [/color]

The chesterfield that hamburger described, and that I remember, had the same style of operation as a futon.

http://www.futonoutfitters.com/futons101.htm

scroll down to

there are good diagrams underneath.

I remember the ridge in the middle of our chesterfield, and the one at my grandmother's house. Back killers. Seinfeld-episode-quality-back killers.

This is, what is called a "Chesterfield" in English catalogues:



More "chesterfields"

A Futon looks different here in Europe/UK

Boston, MA and Santa Cruz, CA:

A Chesterfield is a cigarette brand.

walter's pic # 1 : this is what we call a safa-bed or pull-out sofa; it has a separate and removable mattress. walter's pic #2 : that's what our chesterfield looked like; you pulled the front/bottom section and the back would flip down, also had a storage box underneath (and some straight armrests). i don't think they make them anymore in canada. but just read in the sunday papers that there is a demand for murphy-beds again ! i guess what's old is new again ! hbg. ...people with small apartments/condos are apparently the buyers of murphy-beds... i still remember the carol burnett show where carol and tim conway had an apartment with a murphy/wallbed; and they were working different shifts and the bed was coming down, going up, coming down, going up ... you get the idea

This is what they are in Oz.

The sofa bed is a sofa bed - and chesterfield is never used for any other than the leather, buttoned thingy Equus describes.

I had no idea it was not so everywhere!

here is one:

Code Borg!!!!!! hello!!!! How are you? Missed you!

And the chesterfield cigarette, of course.

Great that Antique Leather can give us the definitive answer! But how is he/she allowed to advertise with his website when mine was erased [sulk]

Miss Clary, it's sunday, the joker probably has not been spotted by the moderators yet.

If it bothers you, you can report the post, and ask the moderator why it is still left showing . . .


(Edit: I reported the post--after all, sauce for the goose . . . )

And voilà, either the post was removed by moderators, or Antique Leather decided to disappear . . .

a friend of mine (miss Brenda to Setanta), just bought one of those futon-style sofas - they told her she was buying a chesterfield in the store.