I grew up in a polyglot of American dialect. Dad from New Hampshire, Mom from Georgia, military family in a highly mobile neighborhood.
That said, my understanding growing up was this:
Front room: A formal room only for grown ups, no TV or radio (may be called a “Parlor” below the Mason-Dixon line)
Living room: A room with nicer sofas than the den, but suitable only for quiet, clean pursuits like reading or visiting for company, no TV or radio
Den/TV room: Upstairs room where visitors are allowed and a much more relaxed setting. TV, radio, stereo, board games etc. are in here.
Rumpus room/Rec room: Basement room or back room with really crappy, comfy, furniture where kool-aid and feet on the sofa are OK. Only intimate family friends and little kid visitors will ever see this room. (“Rec” room may have foos ball or ping-pong tables.)
I have what one can be described as a front room, but it is not my living room. My front room, which I usually call my sitting room, is a presentable room to entertain impromptu guests and a room that is right in the entry area. It is a room that is not used for really anything else (except for travel though), so easy to keep presentable. The living room is and usually looks lived in, and is the comfy couch, big screen TV, and fireplace room which is where the ‘living’ occurs.
I grew up in west-central Indiana as well (Montgomery County, to be slightly specific).
We called it a “living room,” but interestingly at my grandparents’ house, they called the room where they hung out and watched TV the “family room.” The “living room” was a somewhat more formal room where, to be honest, nobody ever did much of anything.
Grew up in Indiana with my Hoosier parents. The “nice” room you weren’t allowed to go in was the living room. The one we actually used was the family room.
Now that I have my own house I’ve circumvented the issue by having a library and a TV room.
That’s my exact experience with homes with that setup in upstate NY and Delaware (the only places I’ve spent a lot of time in them although I’m sure I’ve seen more.) The family room is in the back, with the TV, where the family socializes, the Living room is in the front with a couch for secluded reading/thinking, and maybe a piano, and used for more formal gatherings.
But most 2 story homes I’ve been in don’t have this configuration. Lots of one-off, weird, farmhouses, along with a couple ones that had the living room in the front half of the first story with an open access to the formal dining room, with an opening from it to the kitchen which also had a breakfast nook where most of the actual eating occurred.
Clevelander here. We always called it the “living room”. My grandparents in Appalachian PA also called that room the “living room”: One might occasionally refer to the “front room” at Gramma’s house, but that was an unheated enclosed section of porch that was mostly just used for storage (and which happened to be the frontmost room of the house). It wasn’t until the house was put up for sale that I realized that the door into that room was originally the front door to the house.
With a mother that grew up in the Ozarks and a father that grew up in Chicago, our family’s nomenclature was unique.
The first house I lived in had the “front room” in the back.
The second house was a split level, and the big room with the fancy furniture was on the second level. We never could come up with the right name for it. We fumbled around with terms like “living room,” “big room,” “second level,” and some others, but never settled on one.
The room with the TV and fireplace (where we actually hung out) was on the ground level and known as the “family room.”
When I was a kid, we had one common room where the TV was and where most of the family spent time. We called it the living room. It was at the back of the house and had a slider that opened to the back yard. There was no “family room”. The rooms at the front of the house (facing the street) were bedrooms.
The house I live in now has two common rooms. Both have seating, TV, video game consoles, etc. The one at the front of the house (street facing) is called the front room…because it’s in the front. The other one is part of the great room which also has the kitchen. We don’t call it anything in particular. If pressed, I would probably call it the family room, though we spent more time in the front room. Neither one is particularly formal or informal. Actually, nothing in our house is formal. It’s all casual.
In our house there’s a room as you come in the front door with a couch,coffee table, and a bookshelf. Then you walk into the next room with couch, recliner, tv, some tables. That room is our living room so I guess the other is the front room. I never really thought about it .
The house I grew up in (at least from the ages of 10-18) had both a living room and a front room. The front room was a very large addition on the house that was basically the room my younger brother, and for a while I, kept large toys in when young. It had a pair of love seats and the big old TV we were given when someone upgraded. We were super fortunate to have cable on that TV, and when we were a little older we had video games hooked up to it too. It was very much our room and our parents rarely spent time in it.
I have two connecting main living spaces, both of which have couches and livingroomish stuff. The one at the front of the house with the books and desk is the front room, and the connecting one with the TV is the living room. Probably in another family it would be living room and family room, but front room is how I grew up too (Chicago represent) so it comes naturally.
Our lake house is a 1950’s bungalow that’s been added-on several times. The front door opens to a “what’s it used for?” room. Not knowing if it’s a family room or a front room, we’ve resorted to call it the “F-room”. As in F-ing room, since it’s kind of useless.
Living room which in our case is the front room of the first floor. The sofa and TV are there and that is where friends and family gather when visiting.
Now in another house we had, the front room was just a front room; desk, end table and a couple chairs and not very big. Behind that room towards the rear of the house was our living room with all the comforts you would expect. There was no dining room as we had it set up; just a dining area in the kitchen. It was a smaller 1930s lower-working-class house and set up a little odd but it worked for us pretty well at that point in our lives.
My wife and I mean different parts of the house when we say “living room”, so I try to use the terms “front room” and “family room” to avoid confusion. (When I say living room, I mean the family room.)
Yes, it has become that way. That’s why I think calling it Front Room depends on the age of the house and predates the term Living Room. In pre-1950 homes, the social gathering rooms were on the front of the house, with utilitarian activities at the back. People didn’t gather in the kitchen in those days, it was dirty, hot and smelly. In the evenings people gathered on the front porch after dinner and talked to neighbors walking by.
Gradually houses became more oriented to the back instead of the front, with family rooms that overlook the back yard and of course you can’t turn on any show on HGTV without “open concept” being mentioned within 5 minutes tops.
Open kitchens are now where everyone gathers and people enjoy seeing a meal come together rather than having it served to them in a separate dining room. Cooks used to actually want their kitchens sort of walled off because they didn’t want their guests seeing the dirty dishes.
I think Front Room versus Living Room (in the back) just shows the way lifestyles have changed.
Just like garages got pushed up to the front of the house beginning in the 1950s so Dad could show off that shiny new Buick Pontiac.
People still living in pre-1950s homes may still use the term Front Room, because they actually have one.
Houses overall for the last few decades have been designed for us to roll into the garage shut everything down and not see or talk to anybody as we sit in our Living Rooms in the back.
This describes me exactly (including the growing up in Indiana and the Hoosier parents part). Our living room was, as a matter of fact, in the front of the house, but we never called it the front room. That would have seemed too blandly descriptive.
This thread makes me smile. We had a front room growing up, but as I grew older it started to sound weird to me to refer to it as a front room, since none of my friends had front rooms.
We had a front room and a sitting room. The front room had a sectional couch facing an entertainment center. We mainly used the room to watch TV, but the TV wasn’t on that much. The sitting room had a couch on one side of the room, and two arm chairs on the other, and they faced each other, and so when we had guests we would bring them into the sitting room so we could all face each other as we talked without awkwardly bumping legs against each other. There was no television in that room, but I would sometimes sit on the couch to read a book.
Since moving out of the house, I never lived in a place big enough to have two living rooms, so I’ve always called my one single living room the “living room.” I live in the DC area, for reference.
Another Chicago-area resident with a front room. Although I used to hear “parlor” from my grandmother back in the day.
My wife used to live in Virginia and was confused as could be about what the “front room” was versus the “living room” or why anyone says “front room” at all. In my case, the front door opens to the front room (couch, no TV) and the living room is in the rear (and has the television).
Back in the late 1980’s / early 1990’s there was a wave of politically correct hysteria that swept over the Real Estate industry, particularly affecting the wording of advertising. The phrase “family room” became forbidden, because using that phrase in advertising seemed to imply that the home was being marketed to a family — hence, discriminatory against single people in violation of anti-discriminatory laws about marital status.
You couldn’t advertise a house as being “near schools” because that seemed to be “steering” childless people away in favor of families. You couldn’t mention “quiet neighborhood” because that was seen as code-speak for “families with children need not apply”. You couldn’t mention “majestic ocean views” because that discriminated against the blind. Any mention of nearby churches or synagogues was right out.
The Real Estate industry published lists of suspect words or phrases for advertisers to avoid. Self-appointed Protectors of the Public Good made a cottage industry of scouring Real Estate classified ads for questionable language and filing lawsuits over infractions.
.