toilet
/ˈtɔɪlɪt
/- Seat covers have been available for decades, and it used correctly, most seat covers will flush down the toilet without the user touching them.
- You probably wash up your dirty dishes immediately after eating, and stick bleach down the toilet with every tenth flush.
- A third of all household water is flushed down the toilet, so control the amount of water you use by putting a plastic bottle or ‘hippo’ in your cistern.
Synonyms
- Although work is on a public floor of the building, the toilets are locked, secured by carefully guarded keys.
- Marketing is described as weak and many buildings lacked public toilets, baby changing facilities and refreshment areas.
- In the toilets, the one cubicle with a working light had a broken lock.
- She quickly changed into an older dress and completed a brief toilet.
Synonyms
- The chaplain's office became the receiving and distribution point for clothing and toilet articles.
- When I had arranged these, with my hairbrush and other toilet articles on the dressing table, the place began to look quite homelike.
- There was a camp canteen where the prisoners could buy cigarettes, toilet articles or canned food.
- PDT treatments were applied to the left mainstem lesion along with debridement and bronchoscopic toilet.
- The loss of ciliated epithelium emphasizes the need for hydration to improve the pulmonary toilet.
- There is little dignity in being washed, fed, or swung up in a hoist to be toileted.
- If asleep, the patient was not toileted or changed.
- When you complain about your dog's poor toileting habits, you are basically admitting that you have failed to train him adequately.
- When we reprimand a dog for toileting indoors we think we are teaching him not to go indoors, but to go in the garden.
- Having been trained by the Kennedy's dog trainers, the black and white puppy reportedly made no toileting errors and did not gnaw on the furniture.
Phrases
go down the toilet
Origin
Mid 16th century: from French toilette 'cloth, wrapper', diminutive of toile (see toile). The word originally denoted a cloth used as a wrapper for clothes; then (in the 17th century) a cloth cover for a dressing table, the articles used in dressing, and the process of dressing, later also of washing oneself (sense 2 of the noun). In the 19th century the word came to denote a dressing room, and, in the US, one with washing facilities; hence, a lavatory (early 20th century).
A toilet was originally a cloth used as a wrapper for clothes or a covering for a dressing table, from French toilette ‘cloth, wrapper’. From the first meaning developed a group of senses relating to dressing and washing, including ‘the process of washing, dressing, and attending to your appearance’, now rather dated, which is also expressed in the French form toilette. In the 18th century it was fashionable for a lady to receive visitors during the later stages of her ‘toilet’, which led to uses such as this by the dramatist Sir Richard Steele in 1703: ‘You shall introduce him to Mrs Clerimont's Toilet.’ People started using the word for a dressing room, and, in the USA, one with washing facilities. It was not until the early 20th century that it became a particular item of plumbing, namely a lavatory. See also loo. The French word was a diminutive of toile, used for a type of dress fabric since the late 18th century, and of toils (mid 16th century) for entrapment, a figurative use of an earlier sense, ‘net’. Toil in the sense of hard work in Middle English has had a bad reputation from the start, as it was originally used to mean ‘strife, quarrel, battle’, and from then came to be used for something unpleasantly hard. It comes via French from Latin tudiculare ‘stir about’.