bedroom
Pluralbedrooms
- 1Any room set aside for sleeping, with a bed in it, whether in a house, apartment, hotel, or other dwelling.
Each bedroom in the house has its own window facing the garden.
The hotel offered a suite with two spacious bedrooms.
Note
A plain compound of bed and room, written as a single word. It also works before another noun, classing things by the room they belong to, as in Margery Allingham's "a suite of bedroom furniture" in The China Governess (1963). This literal room is also what the euphemistic sense borrows.
- 2The setting where sexual activity takes place, often standing in for a couple's intimate life together.
After years together, they admitted the spark in the bedroom had faded.
The book offers couples practical advice for keeping the bedroom exciting.
Note
Here the room stands in for what happens in it. It is a euphemism that lets people raise sex without naming it. The usual frame is the definite article after in: "things in the bedroom," "life in the bedroom." That is the phrasing of a therapist's question or a Cosmopolitan horoscope. Outside that frame, readers are likely to hear the room itself, so keep the preposition and article when the euphemism is meant.
Practice
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Origin
Formed from the combination of "bed" and "room."