1740-60. At home, matters were a little more comfortable. Wealthier households might have an earth closet, a kind of dry toilet which ensured that waste was buried in soil, and virtually every dwelling had at least one chamber pot or a bourdaloue, which would be emptied into a cesspit (by a servant, if you were lucky).
The outhouse of the 1770s was known as a “necessary,” or a “privy.” Benjamin Franklin's brick-lined “privy pit” is even marked at the spot of his former Philadelphia residence of 1787. Several years ago, sanitation was voted as the world's biggest medical advancement since 1840.
Lavatory. Another word with a Latin root, lavatory comes from 'lavare'. During the Medieval period it evolved into 'lavatorium' (which means washbasin), before arriving at the lavatory at some point in the 14th century.
In the 1600s toilets were called "chamber pots." Chamber pots would be kept in one's bedroom, either beside or under their bed. After finishing one's business in the chamber pot they threw their waste onto the streets. The streets were open sewers; it was very common for people to get hit by waste.
We've looked into the stories behind a handful of them. The WC - Still in use today, the abbreviation WC stems from the term “water closet” which is what we used to call toilets in the Victorian era.
Loo. Toilet. An outdoor toilet is a Dunny and an indoor toliet is called a loo. So you might say, "You can use the dunny out the back on the loo in the front." And that's how you say "toilet" in Australian.
The medieval toilet or latrine, then called a privy or garderobe, was a primitive affair, but in a castle, one might find a little more comfort and certainly a great deal more design effort than had been invested elsewhere.
The word “latrine,” or latrina in Latin, was used to describe a private toilet in someone's home, usually constructed over a cesspit. Public toilets were called foricae. They were often attached to public baths, whose water was used to flush down the filth.
Water Closet
A “toilet” was just a dressing table or washstand, a meaning that eventually got flushed away when water closets adopted the moniker. In the 1880s, the earliest flushing water closets were made to resemble familiar chamber pots and commodes.
Late 1700 – 1800 By the 17th century people living in towns and cities had a deep pit for burying waste in called a cess pit in their garden. The sewage was col- lected at night by Night Soil Men who took the stuff away in large carts and buried it outside the city walls.
Loo is an informal yet polite British term for toilet. The word “loo” has interesting origins and can be traced back to Medieval Europe, when chamber pots had to be emptied from bedroom windows onto the street below.
Carsey/ Khazi
(Noun) Originating from the Cockney region its usage is much more common with people in Liverpool. It comes from the Italian term casa meaning “house.” This slang refers to the lavatory or toilet itself. Example: Never use a public carsey.
THE LOO. The 'loo' is very common in the UK & Ireland, and is a safe and polite way to say toilet.
Courtesy of North Carolina Office of Archives and History, Raleigh. Privies—also known as latrines, loos, johns, outhouses, ajaxes, toilets, or necessaries—were typically small, separate structures associated with a larger domestic, commercial, or industrial building.
A latrine is a toilet or an even simpler facility that is used as a toilet within a sanitation system. For example, it can be a communal trench in the earth in a camp to be used as emergency sanitation, a hole in the ground (pit latrine), or more advanced designs, including pour-flush systems.
Toilets – known as latrines – were positioned as far away as possible from fighting and living spaces. The best latrines came in the form of buckets which were emptied and disinfected regularly by designated orderlies. Some latrines were very basic pit or 'cut and cover' systems.
1740-60. At home, matters were a little more comfortable. Wealthier households might have an earth closet, a kind of dry toilet which ensured that waste was buried in soil, and virtually every dwelling had at least one chamber pot or a bourdaloue, which would be emptied into a cesspit (by a servant, if you were lucky).
Leaves, sticks, moss, sand and water were common choices, depending on early humans' environment. Once we developed agriculture, we had options like hay and corn husks. People who lived on islands or on the coast used shells and a scraping technique.
By the late 16th century, public bathing was consequently no longer widely practised in England. It also declined in other western countries from the 16th to 18th centuries. Public toilets remained in use by the English lower classes, and were often situated in bridges over rivers.
In the first millennium bc, ancient Greeks of the Classical period and, especially, the succeeding Hellenistic period developed large-scale public latrines — basically large rooms with bench seats connected to drainage systems — and put toilets into ordinary middle-class houses.
Water closet and W.C. were common euphemisms then, coming after crapper became tainted. Toilette was a fancy word for a wash-up; one made one's toilette. Toilet, bathroom, and bowl are later euphemisms, after W.C. was retired.
Tudor Toilets
Toilets were called 'Privies' and were not very private at all. They were often just a piece of wood over a bowl or a hole in the ground. People would wipe their bottoms with leaves or moss and the wealthier people used soft lamb's wool.
Instead of toilets, people used cesspits, which are holes dug outside for toilet waste. What Did Vikings make their houses out of? The Vikings used wool. The Colonial Americans used the core center cobs from shelled ears of corn.
Instead of toilets, people used cesspits, which are holes dug outside for toilet waste. How did they keep the smell and unsightly view from passerby's? They built a fence around the cesspit. Many of these cesspits have been found by archeologists studying Viking remains.
So with time on his hands, Harington came up with Britain's first flushing toilet, which he called the “Ajax” (apparently from “a jakes,” a common slang word for an outhouse). In 1596, he even detailed his work in a tongue-in-cheek book called “A New Discourse upon a Stale Subject: The Metamorphosis of Ajax.”