Roommate

How to spell roommate

8 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce roommate

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does roommate mean?

1. nounA person you share a room, dormitory, or rented home with.

Roommate in a sentence

• My roommate and I split the rent and the utility bills each month.

• Her college roommate studied late and kept the desk lamp on.

Where does roommate come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is a transparent compound built from two old English elements, and its spelling trap lives entirely in the seam where they join. 'Room' descends from the Old English 'rum', which literally meant 'space' or 'extent' rather than a walled chamber; the sense of an enclosed room came later. 'Mate' arrived in Middle English from Middle Low German and Dutch 'mate', meaning a companion, especially one you share food or quarters with, and it is related to 'meat' in the older sense of food shared at a table. When the two were bolted together to mean a person you share a room with, the compound kept both letters from the boundary: the final 'm' of 'room' and the 'm' of 'mate', giving the doubled 'mm' that writers so often reduce to one. The word became common in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries with shared lodgings, dormitories, and college life.

How the word is built

• room (a space in a building)
• mate (companion); the two m's collide at the seam, room
• mate