toilette

Toilet comes from French toilette, a diminutive of toile (cloth, fabric), from Latin tela (web, weave). A toilette was a small cloth — specifically, the cloth draped over a dressing table while a woman arranged her hair and applied cosmetics. The word named the cloth. Then it named the process of grooming (making one's toilet). Then it named the table. Then the room. Then, in American English, the plumbing fixture.

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, 'making one's toilet' was the standard phrase for the elaborate ritual of dressing and grooming. Samuel Pepys, Alexander Pope, and Jane Austen all use toilet in this sense. The word was elegant, even aristocratic. Eau de toilette — toilet water — was a light fragrance applied during the grooming process. The phrase survives in the perfume industry, where eau de toilette is still a standard product category.

The American euphemism treadmill seized the word in the nineteenth century. Americans needed a polite word for the room containing the commode, and toilet — already associated with private rooms and personal care — was promoted. Or demoted, depending on your perspective. By the early twentieth century, American toilet meant the porcelain fixture. The British followed more slowly, maintaining toilet for the room while using loo, lavatory, or WC as alternatives.

The word has fallen so far from its original meaning that eau de toilette, which literally means 'grooming water,' sounds faintly ridiculous to American ears — toilet water? The French word for a small cloth, through a series of metonymic transfers, became the English word for a plumbing fixture. Each transfer was a step down in social register. The cloth has not changed. The word has.