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bathroom

nounverbcommon in dialogue

  • United Kingdom//ˈbɑːθɹʊm//
  • United Kingdom//ˈbɑːθɹuːm//
  • United States//ˈbæθˌɹum//
  • United States//ˈbæθɹʊm//

A room containing a shower or bathtub, and (typically but not necessarily) a toilet.

noun

  1. 1

    A room containing a shower or bathtub, and (typically but not necessarily) a toilet.

    “down this ‘ere little stair–mind your ‘ead, mum–everythink is modern, put in by Mr. Noakes w’en ‘e took to lettin’ for the summer.” ”A bathroom?” asked Harriet hopefully. ”Well, no, m’lady, not a bath'''room,” replied Mrs. Ruddle, as though that were too much to expect, “but everythink else is quite modern as you’ll find–only requirin’ to be pumped up night and morning in the scullery.”

    Although there was a cloakroom on the ground floor, the Old Rectory had only one bathroom, a defect which necessitated embarrassed, low-voiced enquiries before anyone upset their carefully worked-out rota by taking an unexpected bath.

    I wash in the bathroom.

  2. 2

    A lavatory: a room containing a toilet and (typically but not necessarily) a bathtub.

    Most Americans don't know 'WC' and many Brits mock 'bathroom' but almost everyone understands 'toilet' or 'lavatory'.

Etymology

Etymology tree Proto-Indo-European *bʰeh₁- Proto-Germanic *baþą Proto-West Germanic *baþ Old English bæþ Middle English bath English bath Proto-Indo-European *Hrew-? Proto-Indo-European *(H)rewH-der. Proto-Germanic *rūmą Proto-West Germanic *rūm Old English rūm Middle English roum English room English bathroom From bath + room. Compare Dutch badkamer (“bathroom”), German Badezimmer (“bathroom”), Swedish badrum (“bathroom”), Faroese baðrúm (“bathroom”).

verb

  1. 1

    To assist a patient with using the toilet and general personal hygiene.

Forms

plural
bathrooms
past tense
bathroomed
past participle
bathroomed
present participle
bathrooming
third person singular
bathrooms
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).