Toilet

How to spell toilet

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce toilet

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does toilet mean?

1. nounA bowl-shaped plumbing fixture, and the room containing it, used for the disposal of bodily waste.

Toilet in a sentence

• The plumber replaced the cracked toilet in the upstairs bathroom.

• She asked the waiter where the toilet was before they ordered.

Where does toilet come from?

Language of origin: French

The word comes from the French toilette, a diminutive of toile meaning 'cloth', which itself descends from the Latin tela, a 'web' or piece of woven material. In its earliest English use during the 1500s and 1600s, a toilet was literally the cloth thrown over the shoulders or spread on a dressing table while a person was groomed and dressed. From there the meaning shifted to the whole process of washing, dressing, and arranging one's hair, so a lady might 'make her toilet' before an evening out. By extension it came to mean the dressing room itself, and over the 1800s, by a polite avoidance of blunter terms, it settled into its modern sense of a lavatory and the plumbing fixture found there. The single 't' in the middle and the lack of a doubled letter trip people up precisely because the word feels heavier and more elaborate than its quiet little French 'small cloth' origins suggest.

How the word is built

• toil- (from French toile: cloth)
• -ette/-et (diminutive suffix: little cloth)