a style of building derived from the traditional Swiss chalet.
2 n. — Quebec, housing
a vacation home.
Type: 3. Semantic Change — While meaning 1 is frequently used across Canada it is not distinctly Canadian in the sense of the DCHP-2 typology (see Dollinger 2015c). However, in Quebec, specifically Montreal, chalet has undergone semantic change to refer to a home used during the summer period or holidays (see Boberg 2012: 500), most likely as a result of contact with Canadian French. According to Boberg (2005: 42), it is one of five major variants in Canada used to describe such a house, along with cabin and cottage. All variants are highly region specific. Boberg suggests that chalet arose as an alternate word for a vacation home because in Quebec cottage is used to describe a two-storey permanent residence.
See also COD-2, s.v. "chalet" (3), which is marked "Cdn (Que.)".