Water Closet A “toilet” was just a dressing table or washstand, a meaning that eventually got flushed away when water closets adopted the moniker. In the 1880s, the earliest flushing water closets were made to resemble familiar chamber pots and commodes.
1857: The first American patent for a toilet, the 'plunger closet', was granted. 1858: The first flush toilets on the European continent may have been installed in Christiania (now Oslo), Norway. The toilets were probably imported from Britain, as they were referred to by the English term “water closets”.
For the working classes the “privy” was one or two toilets shared amongst the inhabitants of a whole street. These were often nothing more than a wooden bench with a hole in it over a brick built ash pit.
Medieval toilets, just as today, were often referred to by a euphemism, the most common being 'privy chamber', just 'privy' or 'garderobe'. Other names included the 'draught', 'gong', 'siege-house', 'neccessarium', and even 'Golden Tower'.
17th and 18th Century Toilets Became Cesspits
During this time, many took to their gardens to create a cesspit where they would bury their waste. Overnight, Night Soil Men would then empty the pits and remove the waste.
1740-60. At home, matters were a little more comfortable. Wealthier households might have an earth closet, a kind of dry toilet which ensured that waste was buried in soil, and virtually every dwelling had at least one chamber pot or a bourdaloue, which would be emptied into a cesspit (by a servant, if you were lucky).
Late 1700 – 1800 By the 17th century people living in towns and cities had a deep pit for burying waste in called a cess pit in their garden. The sewage was col- lected at night by Night Soil Men who took the stuff away in large carts and buried it outside the city walls.
The bog. One of the most commonly known and albeit, cruder terms has to be the “bog”. To simply put it, the term “bog” comes from quite a literal sense back in 1789 from the 'boghouse', which is British slang meaning to defecate.
'Lavatory' is a good option for people looking for a very formal word to use in very formal occasions.
The use of the term "head" to refer to a ship's toilet dates to at least as early as 1708, when Woodes Rogers (English privateer and Governor of the Bahamas) used the word in his book, A Cruising Voyage Around the World.
An outdoor toilet is a Dunny and an indoor toliet is called a loo. So you might say, "You can use the dunny out the back on the loo in the front." And that's how you say "toilet" in Australian.
Water Closet
A “toilet” was just a dressing table or washstand, a meaning that eventually got flushed away when water closets adopted the moniker. In the 1880s, the earliest flushing water closets were made to resemble familiar chamber pots and commodes.
Though houses in the 1920s had lavatories, chamber pots in the bedrooms were still often preferred as the commode of choice. It was the job of the chambermaid to collect the pots a few times throughout the day and dispose of the contents.
Garderobes. Garderobes were the Middle Age's term for what we refer to as restrooms. They contain only a toilet and sink, and were mostly found in Medieval castles. Waste from garderobes would drop directly into a sewage pit below, called a cesspit.
In the 1600s toilets were called "chamber pots." Chamber pots would be kept in one's bedroom, either beside or under their bed.
In British English, "bathroom" is a common term but is typically reserved for private rooms primarily used for bathing; a room without a bathtub or shower is more often known as a "WC", an abbreviation for water closet, "lavatory", or "loo".
Privy is a very old word for what we'd call the bathroom, with it earliest citation in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) from 1225. The word privy comes from the Old French privé, “intimate friendly; a private place.”
A urinal (US: /ˈjʊərənəl/, UK: /jʊəˈraɪnəl/) is a sanitary plumbing fixture for urination only. Urinals are often provided in public toilets for male users in Western countries (less so in Muslim countries).
synonyms for bathroom
On this page you'll find 19 synonyms, antonyms, and words related to bathroom, such as: lavatory, restroom, powder room, toilet, washroom, and water closet.
Le petit coin, le trône – other words for the toilet, common slang.
You can say bagno, but this noun also means bathroom or bath. There is the French “toilette” that is also used in the Italian language, or if you're a bit posh, you can ask for the servizi igienici (sanitary services). But perhaps the most precise translation for toilet is gabinetto (masculine, plural gabinetti).
(Cockney rhyming slang) Excrement; the act of defecation. Used other than figuratively or idiomatically: see pony, trap.
The word “latrine,” or latrina in Latin, was used to describe a private toilet in someone's home, usually constructed over a cesspit. Public toilets were called foricae. They were often attached to public baths, whose water was used to flush down the filth.
Leaves, sticks, moss, sand and water were common choices, depending on early humans' environment. Once we developed agriculture, we had options like hay and corn husks. People who lived on islands or on the coast used shells and a scraping technique.
Use the latrines
Toilets – known as latrines – were positioned as far away as possible from fighting and living spaces. The best latrines came in the form of buckets which were emptied and disinfected regularly by designated orderlies. Some latrines were very basic pit or 'cut and cover' systems.