Other forms: rooms
A room is one of the separate spaces inside a building, with its own walls and door. The front room, four rooms upstairs, book a room.
As an uncountable noun, room means space: make room, no room, room for one more. That sense is older than the countable one. It also means scope or possibility: room for improvement, room for doubt, room to manoeuvre. Note the compounds bedroom, bathroom, classroom, waiting room; and the phrases the elephant in the room, meaning an obvious problem nobody mentions, and read the room.
1nounroomA separate space inside a building.~93%
“The room at the back gets the sun all afternoon.”
2nounspaceSpace for something.~2%
“There is room for one more chair and no more.”
3nounscopeScope or possibility.~5%
“There is room for improvement in almost every line.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 20 sentences found in the wild and placed 20 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
room is a space.
Old English rum meant space or extent, with no walls implied at all. The enclosed sense came much later, which is why room can still mean bare space — the older meaning simply never left.
Middle English
roum
English, today
room
Built from
From Middle English roum. From Middle English roum (“room, space”), from Old English rūm (“room, space”), from Proto-West Germanic rūm (“room”), from Proto-Germanic rūmą (“room”), from Proto-Indo-European (H)rewH- (“to root; to rip, tear”), from Hrew- (“to tear out, open”). 2
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA