What is a flea market?

A flea market is a market, usually held outdoors, where traders sell secondhand goods and antiques. Merriam-Webster defines it as 'a usually open-air market for secondhand articles and antiques.' The name translates the French marche aux puces, market of fleas, a derisive nickname for stalls of worn clothes and rags.

Where did the term flea market come from?

The term comes from the insect: dictionaries trace it to the French marche aux puces, a mocking name for markets whose secondhand clothes and rags were believed to carry fleas. The earliest known English example is a Copenhagen letter printed in The Sun of New York on 29 May 1887, and the stories crediting New York's Fly Market, which closed in 1822, or Paris dealers who had to flee have little evidence behind them.

Do flea markets have fleas?

The name does not describe today's markets; it records a 19th-century belief that the worn clothes, rags and bedding sold at them carried fleas. A 1922 book quoted by Etymonline says the Paris market was so called because its secondhand goods were believed to gather fleas, and the 1887 Copenhagen letter said the old women's stock of second-hand clothes and rags 'certainly harbored a fair share.'

What is the biggest flea market in the world?

The Marche aux Puces de Paris Saint-Ouen, on the northern edge of Paris, describes itself as the world's largest concentration of antique and secondhand dealers. Its official site counts about 1,100 dealers and galleries across 7 hectares and more than 5 million visitors a year.

What do the British call a flea market?

British English has two common names for similar events: the jumble sale, a sale of used clothes and other goods to raise money for a church, school or other organization, and the car boot sale. The Cambridge Dictionary defines a car boot sale as an event where people sell their unwanted possessions, often from the backs of their cars, and gives swap meet as the American equivalent.

Why Is It Called a Flea Market? The Name Was a Jeer

The third of three possible origins in Matt Soniak’s Mental Floss explainer hands the credit to New York. Dutch traders who settled New Netherland, it says, had an outdoor market “they called the Vlaie (sometimes spelled as Vly, or Vlie) Market,” named for their word for swamp. English speakers “pronounced the word with an f up front,” and “the Fly/Flea Market and other places like it eventually all became flea markets.”

New York’s Fly Market closed in 1822, 65 years before the earliest known “flea market” in English print.

Why is it called a flea market?

A flea market is named for the insect. The English name is usually traced to the French marche aux puces, “market of fleas,” a mocking name for markets of secondhand clothes and rags that people believed carried fleas. The earliest English example found so far, from 1887, describes a market in Copenhagen.

Etymonline dates the English term to 1910 and quotes a 1922 book, In Europe: the Paris market is so called “because there are so many second-hand articles sold of all kinds that they are believed to gather fleas.” Merriam-Webster’s dictionary gives a first known use of 1891. Both dates are later than the 1887 letter.

The New York Fly Market story fails on dates

The Fly did come from Dutch, through the name of a marsh rather than the market itself. Records from as early as 1655 call a salt marsh along the East River “Smee’s Vlie, Smidt’s Vley,” which English-speaking New Yorkers turned into “Smith’s Fly.” They were “adopting the sound of the name, without the sense,” Thomas F. De Voe wrote in The Market Book, his 1862 history of public markets.

The city granted a petition for the market in 1699, and the market house went up about seven years later at the foot of Maiden Lane. It was a food market, with butchers among its stallholders.

On 21 January 1822, the Gazette announced that Fulton Market would open the next day and that sales at the Fly Market “will be discontinued.” Several butchers stayed on while the building was torn down. The last sale, De Voe recorded, ended when a piece of the roof fell between a butcher’s son weighing out meat and his customer, a ship’s captain.

De Voe never calls it the Flea Market. Like the egg cup story behind cocktails, the New York version fails on dates.

The earliest known English example is from Copenhagen

On 29 May 1887, page 9 of The Sun, a New York paper, carried a short item headed “Last Day of the Flea Market,” taken “From a Copenhagen Letter.” It opens: “Yesterday was the last day of the flea market.”

“The fifty-two old women who have sat haggling over their uncanny wares in the square by the Government pawn shop” had appealed to the Mayor, the Minister of the Interior and finally the King to keep their stands. They were told “there was no room for sentiment in their case.”

“Perhaps the fleas had killed it. Their mixed stock of second-hand clothes, old rags, felt shoes, and crockery certainly harbored a fair share,” the letter went on.

Pascal Treguer, whose Word Histories blog reprints the item, says he does not know whether the writer was translating the French phrase or the Danish loppemarked, from loppe, flea. Merriam-Webster’s article on the term quotes the same letter, crediting it to the New York Herald of the same date.

French papers used the name as a jeer

A French paper had the phrase by 10 December 1887, when Le Farceur of Boulogne-sur-Mer, reviewing paintings of the town, recommended one of a market where old clothes and scrap iron were laid out: “le marche aux puces, quoi,” the flea market, you know.

In October 1890, La Depeche de Brest called the yearly fair on the town’s place de la Liberte “le marche aux puces,” a once-a-year sale of the region’s junk dealers’ stock: worn-out uniforms, bedding with bedbugs, old books, rags and scrap iron. Only someone with “des instincts de rat,” a rat’s instincts, would try to sell it, the reporter wrote.

A week later the paper admitted it had upset the town’s revendeuses, the women who resold old goods. Fourteen of them had signed a protest, written out in elegant calligraphy, against the words “Marche aux puces, marche coquin, bric a brac, guenilles.”

They also took a copy to a rival paper, which turned out to have used “Marche aux puces” as the headline of its own fair report. The Depeche declared itself forgiven for that phrase, since the rival had printed it too, and defended the other words with dictionary definitions.

In June 1891, Paris papers used the name for a ragged open-air market at the Montreuil-sous-Bois gate. “Peu de Parisiens connaissent le Marche-aux-Puces,” La Lanterne began, few Parisians know it: tattered clothes, crushed opera hats and soleless shoes sold beside meat of uncertain freshness.

Saint-Ouen dates its own name to about 1904

The official history of the Saint-Ouen market traces it to the 1870s, when ragpickers driven out of Paris settled beyond the city’s fortifications, and gives 1885 as its official birth date. Their trade was threatened in 1883, when Prefect Eugene Poubelle ordered lidded rubbish bins for the buildings of Paris.

The same history calls the name anonymous, “apparue vers 1904,” appearing around 1904, and says the satirical magazine L’Assiette au beurre made the market famous in 1910 with an entire issue. The newspapers above had used the name at least 13 years earlier.

Date	Where the name appears	Source
29 May 1887	A Copenhagen market of old clothes and rags	The Sun, New York
10 Dec 1887	A market of old clothes and scrap iron	Le Farceur, Boulogne-sur-Mer
7 Oct 1890	The yearly fair in Brest	La Depeche de Brest
24 Jun 1891	The market at the Montreuil gate, Paris	La Lanterne
1891	First known use of “flea market”	Merriam-Webster’s dictionary
About 1904	The name’s arrival, by the market’s own history	Saint-Ouen official site
1910	First date for the English term	Etymonline

The flee story and the bargain hunter, both unsourced

Merriam-Webster also mentions a theory that a bargain hunter declared the Saint-Ouen market of the 1880s “le marche aux puces.” It names no bargain hunter and cites no source.

The other Paris story has dealers displaced by the rebuilding of the city forced to flee, so English speakers called their markets flee markets. Flee and flea only sound alike, the same trap behind the poop deck story. The 1887 letter already means the insect, and Merriam-Webster notes “considerably more evidence for flea than flee.”

Fourteen resellers in Brest protested the name in elegant calligraphy, and it stuck anyway. Saint-Ouen, with about 1,100 dealers and galleries, now carries the old jeer in its official name, the Marche aux Puces de Paris Saint-Ouen. Strictly FYI.