Vocabulaire de la salle de bains en français

What does “tondeuse” mean in French?

Tondre means to cut something back close to the surface: hair, a hedge, grass, a sheep’s fleece. The machine that does it is une tondeuse — clippers at the barber’s, a lawnmower in the garden (une tondeuse à gazon), shears on a farm. Rather than coin a separate word for each, French keeps the one noun and lets what follows say which machine is meant.

The verb carries a second life in money talk: tondre quelqu’un is to fleece someone, and the fuller image is tondre la laine sur le dos de quelqu’un — shearing the wool off someone’s back. So a word learned in a bathroom-vocabulary clip turns up later meaning “taken for everything they had.”