Dance Floor

I’m currently indulging in a Regency Romance where the scene of the hero and heroine’s first meeting is at a ball, as is not unusual in a book of that genre. He invites her to dance, and they make their way to the area in the centre of the ballroom, which the author refers to as the “dance floor”. However, is this the appropriate term for that time? Would Jane Austen, actually writing during the Regency period, have used it to describe the part of the room where Elizabeth and Darcy danced?

The answer to both those questions is “no”. Neither my hero and heroine nor Elizabeth and Darcy would have said they were going to the dance floor. Etymonline, the online etymological dictionary, says the term dates from 1863, and the OED gives its first written example as appearing in the December 1874 edition of Overland Monthly, a magazine published in California in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The age of gracious Regency balls had long since passed by then, and I imagine the term was more likely associated with the rise in popularity of the dance hall in the latter years of the nineteenth century. That era is now also gone, but the term “dance floor” is still with us, probably more commonly associated with a nightclub or perhaps the little square of floor where your tipsy uncle embarrassed your entire family with his awkward gyrations at your wedding reception. He was having a ball though!