There’s the living room, the dining room, the bedroom, the bathroom, and the TV room. So why don’t we call the kitchen the cooking room? This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Why Don’t We Call the Kitchen the Cooking Room?”
Hello, you have A Way with Words.
Well, hello.
This is Diane calling in snowy northeast Iowa.
Diane, what can we do for you today?
Well, I called regarding a word. It’s the word kitchen. Over the last few years, I’ve been thinking about, well, the living room’s the living room. The entry room’s the entry room. The dining room’s the dining room where you dine. The bathroom, you take a bath. The basement’s the base of the house. And so why is the kitchen the kitchen?
Yeah, the word kitchen is different because it’s so much older than all of those other words.
Okay.
All the way back to around the year 1000 when people were speaking Old English. The word was cucina. And it goes back to a Latin word that means to cook, coquer. You see it in…
Oh, cucina.
Oh, that’s very interesting.
Yeah, yeah. It’s like Italian cucina and Spanish cocina. It’s a much, much older word. And then sort of linguistically, we added all these other rooms onto the house, so to speak. The word bedroom comes along much later. It was bedchamber.
Well, my mother, who’s almost 89, said, well, Diane, I think it should be called the workroom. The kitchen should be called the workroom. Over the years from the farm and then coming up through the new generation with everything modern.
-huh.
But she didn’t have an answer either, so could she not?
Yeah, in Old English it was that, and so that one stuck around, and then we added all these other rooms onto the house, like the laundry room or the mud room. Because that was the only room of the house, you know, probably.
Definitely an important room of the house. For a long time, though, if you look at the historical records on this, cooking was done outside the house.
Sure.
Because you didn’t want fire in the house.
That’s correct, probably, yes. You’re right. And bathroom functions as well.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Right. And you’re more likely to live in a kind of combo barn house with the animals next door underneath you and the floor below in order that their body heat would provide heat for the whole home.
Wow.
That’s very true.
Yeah.
That’s so interesting.
Yeah. So it’s actually a really good question. And then you said the word cucina went, that was from the old English, then it went to, you said Italian?
They spring from the same root in Latin, and so that word spread out into all those romance languages and into English.
Okay.
Well, that’s very interesting. I really appreciate this.
Thanks for talking to us, Diane. Have a great day.
Thanks, Diane.
Bye-bye.
Bye-bye.
Email words@waywordradio.org.
