Did you know that the word “silhouette” is an eponym? An eponym is a word that evolves from a personal name, and the English language is littered with them. Words like magnolia, denim, diesel, fuchsia, sadism and even the Sistine chapel started out as the names of individuals!
But of all the surprising eponyms, silhouette is perhaps the most unusual.
The original nameholder was Étienne de Silhouettes, a politician who held the office of Controller-General of Finance from March 4th to November 20th, 1759. By all accounts he was a very intelligent and well travelled man, and his policies were incredibly effective. But deeply unpopular.
He implemented taxes on all overt signs of wealth, including jewellery, servants, buildings and carriages. The upper classes deemed him a miser and the press lampooned him, calling anything cheap “in the style of Silhouettes”.
Portraiture at the time was incredibly expensive, so many settled for a paper cut out sometimes called a “profile” or a “poor man’s portrait”. Though it wasn’t until the mid 1800s that the striking black cutout came to be definitively known as a silhouette.

For that we have Augustin Edouart to thank. He was a French soldier who moved to England in 1814. When teaching French proved to be less ludicrous than he had hoped, he took up cutting profiles, though shortly realized he should rebrand them for English speaking audiences.
And thus the silhouette was born! Edouart was a prolific silhouettist who traveled the UK extensively. His work, and a deeply engrained English language belief that French equates to fanciness, contributed heavily to the evolution of the word “silhouette” to mean a side profile. That and and a dollop of English syntax in the removal of the final /-s/, to make the noun silhouette singular.
It’s important to note that though this etymology has been repeated since the 1800s, it is by no means set in stone. What is most likely is that the descriptor des Silhouettes was floating around in French parlance for some time, and was then galvanized during the brief period of time Étienne de Silhouettes was in office. It subsequently had a number of different meanings, one of which was then solidified through the popularity of the art form.
Etymological Cliffs
An etymological cliff is a period in the history of written language where there is a lot of data in one place but very limited information just before it. These often occur because of technological innovations that increase the amount of surviving written material, or because of educational accessibility creating greater quantities of people who are able to write. For example, when women became able to gain basic education, the variety of written language changed drastically.
Written language is generally a very narrow and misrepresentative slice of language as a whole, in any given time period. So when examining humorous language, or “slang” or anything informal, examples are generally limited and etymologies must take this into account.
In terms of Étienne de Silhouettes, we do not know much of how his name was used before his brief stint in office. So a prior use of the term cannot be discounted, but a subsequent trajectory can be outlined.