toilet [M16th] A toilet was originally a cloth used as a wrapper for clothes or a covering for a dressing table, from French toilette ‘cloth, wrapper’. From the first meaning developed a group of senses relating to dressing and washing, including ‘the process of washing, dressing, and attending to your appearance’, now rather dated, which is also expressed in the French form toilette. People started using the word for a dressing room, and, in the USA, one with washing facilities. It was not until the early 20th century that it became a lavatory. See also loo. The French word was a diminutive of toile, used for a type of dress fabric since the late 18th century, and of toils [M16th] for entrapment, a figurative use of an earlier sense, ‘net’. Toil [ME] in the sense of hard work is a different word and has had a bad reputation from the start, as it was originally used to mean ‘strife, quarrel, battle’, and from then came to be used for something unpleasantly hard. It comes via French from Latin tudiculare ‘stir about’.