Subtitles section Play video Print subtitles 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