room

Meaning

1. Opportunity or scope (to do something).
2. Space for something, or to carry out an activity.
3. A particular portion of space.
4. Sufficient space for or to do something.
5. A space between the timbers of a ship's frame.
6. (obsolete) Place; stead.
7. A separate part of a building, enclosed by walls, a floor and a ceiling.
8. (One's) bedroom.
9. A set of rooms inhabited by someone; one's lodgings.
10. The people in a room.
11. An area for working in a coal mine.
12. A portion of a cave that is wider than a passage.
13. An IRC or chat room.
14. Place or position in society; office; rank; post, sometimes when vacated by its former occupant.
15. A quantity of furniture sufficient to furnish one room.

chamber

space

set of rooms

vacant seat

elbow-room

sleeping room

Jewish religious school

dividing wall

inner room

time to spare

covered place

first room

apartment house

assembly room

Frequency

Pronounced as (IPA)

/ɹʊm/

Etymology tree Proto-West Germanic *rūm Old English rūm Middle English roum English room From Middle English roum, from Old English rūm (“room, space”), from Proto-West Germanic *rūm (“room”), from Proto-Germanic *rūmą (“room”), from Proto-Indo-European *rewh₁- (“free space”). Cognate with Low German Ruum, Dutch ruimte (“space”) and Dutch ruim (“cargo load”), German Raum (“space, interior space”), Danish rum (“space, locality”), Norwegian rom (“space”), Swedish rum (“space, location”), and also with Latin rūs (“country, field, farm”) through Indo-European. More at rural. It is ostensibly an exception to the Great Vowel Shift, which otherwise would have produced the pronunciation /ɹaʊm/, but /aʊ/ does not occur before noncoronal consonants in Modern English native vocabulary.