Why is the kitchen called “The Kitchen” and not “The Cooking room” to follow suit with other room names Bedroom, Living Room, Bathroom etc.
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Interesting question.
When did these areas of home become a “separate room”? I’m guessing the kitchen was a “separate room”within a dwelling before all the other areas (i.e. bedroom, living room and bathroom) were separate rooms.
Interesting note, In the US, even up till the end of WW2, most rural homes didn’t have an indoor toilet but an outhouse.
Kitchen is one of the oldest rooms we have. A medieval castle might have a hall, kitchen, chambers, garderobe, etc. The terms Bedroom, Living Room and Bathroom is all later terms. So when the first kitchens were found and named as such we used the pronunciation at that time. So we did actually call it the cooking room, it was just pronounced kitchen by the Germanic tribes that came up with it. Later on the English language have changed a lot although that exact term have not changed very much. However the related term cooking have changed quite a bit although it is still recognizable to most Germanic languages.
it is
kitchen (n.)
“room in which food is cooked, part of a building fitted out for cooking,” c. 1200, from Old English cycene “kitchen,” from Proto-Germanic *kokina (source also of Middle Dutch cökene, Old High German chuhhina, German Küche, Danish kjøkken), probably borrowed from Vulgar Latin *cocina (source also of French cuisine, Spanish cocina), a variant of Latin coquina “kitchen,” from fem. of coquinus “of cooks,” from coquus “cook,” from coquere “to cook”…
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