Bathroom

How to spell bathroom

8 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce bathroom

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does bathroom mean?

1. nounA room containing a bath or shower, and often a sink and toilet.

Bathroom in a sentence

• The new flat has a small bathroom with a walk-in shower.

• They spent the weekend retiling the bathroom floor.

Where does bathroom come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is a transparent English compound, joining 'bath' and 'room', both of which are native words inherited from Old English. 'Bath' comes from the Old English 'bæth', meaning a washing or bathing of the body, and it shares its roots with the German 'Bad' and the wider Germanic family of words for warming and washing. 'Room' descends from the Old English 'rum', which originally meant 'space' or 'extent' rather than a walled chamber, the same sense preserved in the phrase 'to make room'. The combined word 'bathroom' is relatively modern, emerging in the nineteenth century as fitted indoor plumbing spread through homes and a dedicated space for bathing became standard. In American usage the word drifted to serve as a polite term for a toilet even when no bath is present, which is why 'bathroom' and 'toilet' map onto different social meanings on each side of the Atlantic.

How the word is built

• bath (a wash of the body)
• room (an enclosed space)