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Unread Dec 12th, 2010, 06:58 am
susan53 susan53 is offline
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Default Re: Where is the rest room?

Compounds are always a problem in English - They're sometimes written as one word, sometimes as two and sometimes hyphenated. It's a matter of usage rather than strict rules. Restroom or (rest room? or rest-room?) is an American expression and quite honestly, when I was writing the answer I had no idea which version I should be using. And in fact, I've sometimes used one and sometimes the other. Those of you who use AmEng, how is it usually written? My intuition went for restroom and in fact, when I entered "rest room" into Google it asked me snootily Did you mean restroom? and showed me loads of one-word examples. But I'm not sure. Can it be both? I did find a hyphenated example though - is that common?
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