Hi, I’m Vanessa from SpeakEnglishWithVanessa.com.
Let’s talk about bathroom vocabulary. A great way to remember vocabulary, I know that’s
something that’s difficult for English learners, is to know the words that are around you, to be
able to talk about your daily routine and to talk about the items in your house because that’s what
you interact with the most. So today I’d like to help you build your vocabulary, specifically
for words that are in the bathroom, I’m going to be taking you around this bathroom in my house
and explaining all of the vocabulary words that exist here.
They might not be the same that exists
in your country. So make sure that you let me know in the comments, if there are any things that
exist in your bathroom, that don’t exist in mine. Before we get started, I want to explain some
words that I use to talk about this room. Look at these three words: bathroom, restroom, washroom.
I’m from the US and we use only two of these. Can you guess which two we use? You just heard
me say one of them.
We use bathroom and restroom, but there is a difference between these a bathroom
is generally in someone’s house in some kind of comfortable location. And a restroom is usually
used for a public situation, maybe a restaurant or in your office. If you need to go to the bathroom,
you might use this because it feels a little bit more formal. It’s a little more indirect. It’s a
restroom.
You don’t know what’s happening in the restroom. I’m just resting. So we use restroom
generally to be a little more polite or to talk about bathrooms in a more formal setting. As
for the word washroom, in the US I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone use this. I could be wrong.
It’s generally more associated with Canadians. So in Canada, they often say washroom.
But anytime that I say, this is what they say in Canada, this is what they say in
the UK. Please just understand that I am not an expert in other types of English. I only know
what I’ve experienced here in the US.
What about these words: toilet, loo, John, and water closet.
Well, we do use the word toilet, but we don’t use it to talk about this room. We never say I’m going
to the toilet. It seems gross, or just too direct. And loo, we never say loo in the US. Also John,
we don’t really say the word John either. But, this expression water closet. If you saw this
sign, what would you think that means? Let’s say you’re at a restaurant and you’re looking
for the bathroom and you see this sign on a door. Would you know that that’s the bathroom?
You might be able to guess, but water closet or WC is sometimes on a bathroom door. And it just
means that’s the bathroom. Now, sometimes we use kind of silly words to talk about the bathroom.
For example, you might hear lavatory, powder room, girl’s room.
And these are always, usually said
with that same tone of voice that I just used lavatory, this is a very high class way to say
bathroom. So if you are wanting to be a little bit silly, you might say, “Excuse me, where’s
your lavatory.” If you’re in your friend’s house, you might say, that’d be kind of funny. Or you
might say, “I need to go to the powder room to freshen up.” And I think this is something
that we don’t ever say seriously.
It’s usually just kind of as a little joke, “Oh, I need
to go and make sure that there’s no food in my teeth. I’m going to go to the powder room.”
Or you might hear the girl’s room. And this is not just for little girls. This is talking about the
bathroom. If you go to your friend’s house and you need to go to the bathroom, you might ask where’s
the girl’s room, but only if you’re a girl. We don’t really say where’s the boys room.
I think
that maybe this is just because sometimes women are more indirect about these types of things.
I’m not sure, but occasionally you will hear these silly expressions used with the bathroom. Now
we have two more. What about these two words: porta-potty and porta-John, do you have a
porta-potty in your house? I would be very shocked. These are, a porta-potty or a porta-John,
usually that’s what you would see it at a park or maybe if you go to an outdoor concert or
somewhere that doesn’t have an actual bathroom structure or some kind of restroom outside.
So you might see these types of facilities. All right, now that we have cleared all that up.
When you come to the US, you can use bathroom or restroom, and let’s get onto talking about the
items in my bathroom.
Let’s start off by talking about this. Here we have the sink. Sometimes it’s
called a sink basin, but generally that’s kind of a more formal word. If you’re purchasing a
sink, you might see it called a sink basin. Also, we have the faucet and the hot water handle,
or the cold water handle. I only have one, but you might see some bathrooms that have two, that’s
also pretty common. At the bottom, this thing inside here, down there is the drain. If
you need to fill the sink, you might say, plug the drain. “I need to push that
down, push the drain down so that I can plug the drain and fill up the sink with water.”
And usually, under the sink, you’re going to find some plumbing. Plumbing are the pipes that bring
the water to your faucet, and then away from your drain. Notice that the B here is silent plumb-ing,
plumbing. We’re going to be talking about these items a little bit later in this lesson. So
let’s move on to the next place in the bathroom. All right, here we are by the toilet.
One of the features of the bathroom. In the US we always call this the toilet.
We
don’t call the room the toilet, as I mentioned. So on the toilet, we have two lids. This
is in the US, we have the lid and we have the seat, which can also go up. And this is always
a point of contention in marriages, right? Put the seat down. And this is what a lot of wives
say, put the seat down, don’t leave the seat up. I’m curious if you have ever had this
discussion in your house. Then we have the lid and we have here, this is the toilet bowl.
You
can imagine a bowl. And back here is the flusher or the toilet handle, because we can push this
to flush the toilet. Don’t forget to flush the toilet when you’re finished, to flush the toilet.
Our bathroom, we have installed an extra feature on our toilet. It is this thing. It is a bidet.
This is becoming a little more common in the US but it is certainly not a well-known feature of
a toilet in the US but because my husband and I have lived abroad, we know about bidets,
so we have a bidet installed in our toilet. Also around the toilet, you will see there is
a plunger here for helping the toilet to flow freely. And we have a toilet brush for cleaning
the toilet, some extra toilet paper, but here, if you can see on this side, we have our toilet paper
holder and our toilet paper. I have a question for you. Do you have your toilet paper coming over the
top, or do you have it coming from behind. For me, I prefer it like this coming from the top, but I
know everyone has different opinions about this. Sometimes on the back of the toilet, you
will see a box of tissues.
In the US, we almost always call these Kleenex. This is
the brand, but it’s also just what we generally call this type of item. Or for us, we have a
baby, so we have some baby wipes also on the back of the toilet. Oh, we have one more thing.
This. Do you know what this is? Can you guess? It is called a squatty potty. I actually
got this online. I got this from somebody in my city online. Somebody online said,
“I’m selling a squatty potty thing that you put under your toilet.
Does anyone want to
buy it?” And I said, “Me, I want to buy it.” So I met her at a gas station, kind of felt like
a drug deal because she hopped out of her car. She said, “Are you here for the squatty potty?”
I said, “Yes, I am.” And I gave her my 10 bucks and she gave me the squatty potty and we left.
But this is a kind of a device that helps your body supposedly to be in a better position so that
your bowels can move freely. So I’m not sure if it actually works or not, but it’s something that I
thought was pretty cool. And it was worth the try. Next, let’s talk about the shower or the tub.
Now
in my bathroom here, we have two bathrooms in my house, in this bathroom. We do not have a tub.
I didn’t feel like cleaning our other bathroom. Otherwise I would show you a tub, but this is what
it looks like. Most bathrooms have a tub. And then there’s also a shower. This bathroom does not have
a shower curtain. A shower curtain is the kind of cloth that comes over. Instead, we have these
glass shower doors. You can barely see them in the video, but there are glass doors that block the
water from spraying everywhere in our bathroom. In our shower, we have a shower head, and
sometimes the shower head is detachable, or sometimes it’s just fixed on the wall.
There’s also a shower handle where you can turn on the hot and cold water.
I’m not going to
turn that on right now. So I don’t get too wet. In our shower, we have a squeegee because we
have these glass doors. When they get wet, it’s good to take care of them and not let the water
accumulate on the sides. So we will squeegee them after taking a shower. And this is a
verb and a noun. This is a squeegee, and I need to squeegee the doors.
Sometimes I squeegee the walls too. This is my three year old son’s favorite activity
to squeegee everything. It is pretty fun, but to take care of our shower. On this end
of our shower, we have our shower goods. There is shampoo, conditioner.
There’s also liquid
soap and bar soap. You might have both in your shower, or you might have some kind of shower
scrub. This is a liquid that has some kind of little abrasive pieces in it to scrub your skin.
A lot of people will use maybe a loofa or a sponge or a washcloth to wash their body. We have this
little, it’s the thing that we got in Korea, well, it’s not the same one from Korea, but
it’s this little rag. You can put your hand in it and it’s a little bit scratchy, and you can
kind of just wash yourself with this.
I like it. On the wall of our shower. We have tiles.
These are the shower tiles. A lot of people like this look, but they don’t like taking care
of it because in between here is called grout. And you have to occasionally clean the grout in your
shower. Maybe you need to get an old toothbrush and scrape it. You need to do something. We
have this spray that somebody gave us. It cleans without having to rinse, spray it on your shower
once a day. I don’t do that. I spray it maybe once a week, if I remember, but you can spray it on the
tiles and maybe it makes it so you don’t have to scrub them.
I don’t know. We’ll see what happens,
but there’s different products like that too. You might notice here in the bottom
of our shower is a little turtle. It’s a secret that all Americans keep a little
toy turtle in the bottom of their shower. Don’t tell our secret. Just kidding. It’s my son’s
toy. One more thing is you might, when I hear the term shower stall, a shower stall is
generally in a more public place, like in a gym or in a dormitory where there’s multiple people
showering at the same time. A shower stall are going to be those individual shower spots.
There might be a shower curtain. There might be nothing. It might just be open, but this is kind
of a more public thing. So we don’t really use the term shower stall to talk about the bath shower
area in your house. That’s more in a public place. In our bathroom. We have several types of
towels. One type of towel is simply a bath towel. And we hang that Bechtel on a hook, or
you might have a towel rack or a towel bar where you hang your towel.
We only have these little
hooks to hang our towels on. You also might use a washcloth. I mentioned this previously that
you might use this in the shower. For me, I use this to wash off my face in the morning or in the
evening. And I hang it on this little rack to dry. Another type of towel you might have is simply
a hand towel. All of these are pretty self explanatory, bath towel, wash cloth, I guess you
could wash anything with that, and hand towel. Can you guess what you wash with a hand towel?
You use it to dry your hands and it’s hanging on this ring to let it air out in between washings.
Next, let’s talk about some of the items which might be in your bathroom.
On our counter, we
have a comb. This is not a brush. I have some hair ties, my glasses, some deodorant, and a contact
lens case. You might just say also a contact case. I have my jewelry. There is an outlet for
plugging things in. On the other side, we have a soap dispenser here. Then we have our
toothbrush holder. Inside that toothbrush holder is a toothbrush and toothpaste beside it is an
electric toothbrush. There is some floss, some more deodorant, and underneath here is a glasses
lens, cleaner and another glasses lens cloth. A lot of bathrooms in the US we’ll have a little
closet or some shelves for linens. If this is a separate area, or if it is in your closet, we
still call this a linen closet.
Linens are sheets, towels, blankets. Mine is a little bit messy,
a little bit disorganized, but it’s okay. So here, these are where I keep my linens. On the
other side of that linen closet is another shelf where we keep some bandaids, extra shampoo, these
types of things. And we could call this a medicine cabinet, but it’s not necessarily a cabinet.
You’re going to see that in just a moment. Instead, we’ll still say that this is in the
closet and these are some extra bathroom items. Some other items that you might have
in your bathroom is some contact solution.
This goes with my contact lenses that
I wear occasionally, some contact lens solution. You might also have some Q-tips. I don’t really
use these, but for some reason, we have them. Instead of Q-tips, you might have cotton balls
that look like this or cotton rounds. Sometimes people use these to take off makeup or for other
things, I guess, but you might have other kinds of cotton supplies in your bathroom.
In the bathroom. You have some tweezers and fingernail clippers.
These are giant fingernail covers. And sometimes on the fingernail clippers,
or you might have a separate piece as well, there is a nail file for filing your nails.
Occasionally, this is called an Emery board. I haven’t really heard this an awful lot in my
life, but if someone said, “Oh, I need to buy an Emery board.” I would know what they were talking
about, but it’s not as common as a nail file, which is pretty clear, right? It’s a nail file for
filing your nails.
For shaving. You need a razor. Sometimes it comes with some extra razorblades. I
think Dan has already finished using all of those. This is his razor. We also have some
shaving cream and maybe use some aftershave. I don’t know if this is true in your house, but my
side of the bathroom counter has way more things than Dan’s side of the counter. I think in his
drawer, oh, there’s nothing but an empty box. But on my side, there are quite a few
things. For example, I have some makeup, some different bottles of potions, like makeup
remover. I have… this is just some witch hazel, but it can be used as like a toner for your
skin. And I have some other hair supplies like clips and some things for my hair like
Bobby pins. I’m not sure why we say Bobby, but these are called Bobby pins and you can
put them in your hair to keep your hair back. In the bathroom.
There’s also a curling iron
for curling your hair. You might also have a straightener or you might have a hairdryer. Do
you know what? This hairdryer I got two weeks ago because the hairdryer I had before that I have
had since high school. This hairdryer was like 15 years old, is amazing. No, I guess older than
that, maybe like 16, 17 years old. And finally, it died, but I can’t believe it lasted that long. It
was just a cheap hairdryer from the grocery store, but it lasted a long, long, long time.
And finally it just stopped working. So I have a new hairdryer. Hopefully
this one will also last for 15 years. If you choose not to use a hairdryer, you can
do what’s called air drying.
So you might say, I often say this, “I need to air dry my hair.”
And this is the opposite of using a hairdryer. I need to use the hairdryer or I need to air dry
my hair. Generally, they say that air drying your hair is better for your hair. So usually I air
dry my hair for a while. And then if I’m going to go to bed and it’s still a little wet, I’ll
use the hairdryer a little bit just to kind of make it so that I’m not sleeping in a wet mop.
The final thing I’d like to talk about in the bathroom is laundry and the trashcan
with the trash bag. Your laundry might be in a laundry basket. You might call this
a laundry hamper. I personally don’t use the word hamper. It feels a little bit old fashioned, but
it might just be a regional difference in the US where some places say hamper, some places
say basket, this is the laundry basket. This is kind of soft, but you might have a hard
plastic laundry basket too. In the laundry is dirty laundry.
And this just means dirty
clothes. There’s dirty laundry. I need to put it in the washing machine. And then after that,
I’ll fold it and I’ll put it away in the closet. All right. We talked about a lot of bathroom
and vocabulary in this video. I hope it was useful to you. I went to know tell me in the
comments below, what are some items that I missed or what exists in your bathroom
that doesn’t exist in my bathroom? Let me know in the comments and make sure that
you read other comments as well, so that you can learn about other expressions and other places
around the world. Thank you so much for learning English with me and I’ll see you again next Friday
for a new video here on my YouTube channel. Bye. The next step is to download my free ebook: Five
Steps to Becoming a Confident English Speaker. You’ll learn what you need to do
to speak confidently and fluently. Don’t forget to subscribe to my YouTube channel
for more free lessons. Thanks so much. Bye..