Creole peoples were a mixture of people of European ancestry and slave populations (or free men and women of color). They were also referred to as "criollos", a word from the Spanish language meaning "created" and used in the post-French governance period to distinguish the two groups of New Orleans area and down river Creoles. Both mixed race and European Creole groups share many traditions and language, but their socio-economic roots differed in the original period of Louisiana history. Actually, the French word Creole is derived from the Portuguese word "Crioulo", which described Spaniards born in the Americas as opposed to Spain.
Folk etymology original French "chaise longue" ("long chair"), has come to be associated with the word "lounge". Rebracketing is a process of language change in which parts of a word that appear to be meaningful (such as *"ham" in "hamburger") are mistaken as elements of the word's etymology (in this case, the word "ham"). Rebracketing functions by reanalyzing the constituent parts of a word. For example, the Old French word "orenge" ("orange tree") comes from Arabic "an nāranj" ("the orange tree"), with the initial "n" of "nāranj" understood as part of the article. In back-formation a new word is created, often by