The clothes, bed linen and household things a bride collects and brings with her when she marries. It is an old custom word from a world where a young woman spent years quietly gathering sheets, towels, nightdresses and a few good dresses into a chest before her wedding — sometimes with her mother and aunts sewing beside her. Today the custom has mostly gone in English-speaking countries, and the word has gone with it. You meet it in novels, in period dramas, in wedding magazines being a bit playful ('honeymoon trousseau'), and in older relatives' speech, but hardly ever in plain modern conversation. It is worth knowing anyway, because it appears constantly in nineteenth-century literature, where a girl's trousseau tells you her family's money and her family's hopes in one word. Say it roughly TROO-so; the final -x in the French plural trousseaux is silent, and in English you may also see the plain plural trousseaus. It is not the same as a dowry — a dowry is money or property paid to the husband's family, while a trousseau is her own things, for her own use.

嫁妝（特指新娘帶過門的衣物、寢具等私人用品）。要跟「嫁妝」中偏財產、聘金的那一塊分開——那是 dowry；trousseau 專指她自己要用的衣物被褥，比較接近台灣長輩說的「嫁妝裡的衣服細軟」。