Corsage
small bouquet of flowers worn on a woman's dress or around her wrist
A corsage is a small bouquet of flowers worn on a woman's dress or around her wrist for a formal occasion. They are typically given to her by her date. Today, corsages are most commonly seen at homecomings, proms, and similar formal events.
In some countries, similar ornaments are worn by the mothers and grandmothers of the bride and groom at a wedding ceremony.
Flowers worn by men are generally called buttonholes or boutonnières. At school events such as homecoming or prom, male-female couples generally coordinate the corsage and boutonnière, signifying their connection, and distinguishing them from others. In some cases, young girls may wear a corsage to a father-daughter dance, and the father may also wear a boutonnière.
History
Wearing flowers pinned to clothing dates as far back as Ancient Greece, when small bunches of fragrant flowers and herbs were worn at weddings to ward off evil spirits. During the 16th and 17th centuries, corsages and boutonnières may have been a part of daily life to prevent disease and to ward off evil spirits, but over time, they became special-occasion pieces.
The word corsage comes from the French term bouquet de corsage, meaning a bouquet of flowers worn on upper part of the body ("corsage" meaning girdle, bodice in French), which was traditionally worn by women to weddings and funerals.
The public source identifies “Corsage” as small bouquet of flowers worn on a woman's dress or around her wrist. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Corsage, small and bouquet.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jan 17, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q3335066. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
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This entry incorporates text from “Corsage” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.