Other forms: toilets
The toilet is the white seat in the smallest room of the house. Also the room itself.
British English uses the word plainly for both the fixture and the room, and asking where the toilet is causes nobody any embarrassment. American English avoids it for the room and says bathroom or restroom, keeping toilet for the fixture only. British informal speech has loo, and signs say WC, from water closet. There is also a verb-like older sense, since a person's toilet once meant the whole business of washing and dressing.
1nountoiletA bowl with a seat, used for emptying the bladder and bowels.~75%
“The toilet has been leaking for a week.”
2nounroomThe room containing it.~25%
“The toilet is upstairs on the left.”
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.
Also accepted in games: loo, wc
A toilet was a little cloth. French toilette is the diminutive of toile, cloth, the wrap put round your shoulders while your hair was dressed. It came to mean the dressing, then the room, then the fixture.
Proto-Indo-European
*tek-
Middle French
toilette
English, today
toilet
Built from
Borrowed from Middle French toilette. From Middle French toilette, diminutive of toile (“cloth”), from their use to protect clothing while shaving or arranging hair. From its use as a private room, toilet came to refer euphemistically to lavatories and then to its fixtures, beginning in the United States in the late 19th century.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA