Washroom vs. restroom: Why do Canadians say one and Americans the other?

'What in the world is a washroom?' asked an American content creator on a trip to Canada. 'And what are they washing in there?'

Published Aug 29, 2024  •  3 minute read

A sign for All Gender and Accessible Washrooms at Yorkdale Mall in Toronto on Tuesday December 11, 2018. Photo by Frank Gunn /THE CANADIAN PRESS

A recent video of a couple visiting Canada has revealed a major difference between Canadians and Americans.

The video posted online by American content creators and husband and wife duo Shelby and Dylan Reese had 1.9 million views on TikTok and almost 6,000 comments on Thursday. The pair noticed a word they weren’t familiar with when they crossed the border into Canada.

“What in the world is a washroom?” Dylan says facing the camera, as he walks by sign that says “washroom.”

“And what are they washing in there? Oh, it’s a restroom. The only thing I wash in there is my hands.”

Off-camera, a woman’s voice can be heard asking: “Do you rest in a restroom?”

“That’s a good point. They both don’t make much sense,” he says.

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Users were sounding off in the comments on TikTok and Instagram about the difference between washroom and restroom.

“I didn’t know ‘washrooms’ was a ‘Canadian’ thing I thought it was normal,” wrote one person on TikTok.

Others pointed out that they used “bathroom” instead.

Another person said when they were visiting Disneyland, they asked for the washroom and they “sent me to the laundromat!”

A user posted about the usage of “washroom” on Reddit, asking American English speakers if they used the term at all.

“I recently found out that ‘washroom’ is considered Canadian terminology. I’ve been using “washroom” my whole life and had never noticed,” wrote the person who posted the query online.

Many who said they were American in the comments responded that they used the term “restroom.”

“Washroom, bathroom, and restroom are all interchangeable to me with washroom and bathroom being the most common (restroom feels a bit more formal/polite for some reason),” said one person, who identified themselves as Canadian.

Where do the terms “washroom” and “restroom” come from?

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The word “washroom” indicates a “room that is equipped with washing and toilet facilities,” per Miriam-Webster Dictionary.

Canadians use the term “washroom” to mean toilet facilities that are usually in a public place, while they used “bathroom” to designate a private facility, for example, in someone’s home, according to McGill University linguistics professor Dr. Charles Boberg, who covered the subject in his 2010 book The English Language in Canada.

“It is conceivable that the high frequency of washroom is a preservation from an earlier more widespread North American form that, originally, may have referred to a room for actually washing one’s hands and face, or even a place where one could take a bath,” per the third edition of the Dictionary of Canadianisms on Historical Principles.

Whereas the term “restroom” derived from a more literal sense of a room intended for rest in the late 1800s, the spaces “later had (or were required to have) accessory toilet-rooms, by 1930s the word came to be a euphemism for ‘lavatory, toilet,'” according to the Online Etymology Dictionary.

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The differences in the usage of the terms seem to be due to how the English language spread and evolved “through emigration from Britain and colonialism” and the “adoption of English as an international language by people in non-English-speaking countries beyond the former British Empire,” Boberg wrote.

Settlers in Canada and the U.S. adopted the language and it developed separately in “two new multi-ethnic nations.”

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