A flea market is an informal market, often open-air, where traders sell second-hand goods, bric-a-brac and assorted cheap wares. The name is not a compliment. It rests on the assumption that clothing and furniture which have already been through one household are likely to arrive with fleas included. Anyone hunting for something cheap at half the price knows the territory: part junk heap, part treasure trove.
What’s the origin of the phrase ‘flea market’?
‘Flea market’ is a straight translation of the French ‘marché aux puces’, literally ‘market of the fleas’. That was the nickname given to the second-hand markets on the fringes of Paris, where dealers in old clothes and furniture traded goods that were assumed, fairly or not, to be infested. A market of this sort operated at the Porte de Montreuil from around 1860, and the sprawling market at Saint-Ouen, still trading today, became the most famous bearer of the name.
The phrase reached English print earlier than is often supposed. Dictionaries long dated it to the early twentieth century, and G. S. Dougherty’s travel book In Europe (1922) gave the classic explanation: the Paris market “is called the ‘Flea’ Market because there are so many second hand articles sold of all kinds that they are believed to gather fleas”. In fact the term has been found in The Sun (New York) as early as 29th May 1887, in a letter from Copenhagen reporting that “Yesterday was the last day of the flea market” there. That first sighting may translate the Danish ‘loppemarked’ rather than the French, but the joke is the same one. By July 1891 English and American newspapers were applying ‘Flea Market’ to the Paris market near the Barrière de Montreuil, in reports of a woman who found 14,000 francs in gold hidden in a mattress she had bought there.
For decades the phrase was effectively a proper name for the Paris markets. It became a generic term for any second-hand market after the First World War, once soldiers and tourists who had visited the Paris original carried the name home.
A rival story derives the phrase from the Fly Market, an eighteenth-century market near Maiden Lane in Manhattan whose name came from the Dutch ‘vlie’ or ‘vly’, a marsh. It is a nice tale but it doesn’t stand up. There is no documentary trail connecting the long-defunct New York market to the phrase, and the earliest English uses point squarely at Continental markets and the French name. The fleas, not the swamp, have the better claim.