I had never heard of it. (And my Googling shows up an order of magnitude fewer results, but still a lot, at 988K. I’m not sure how you got 12.8M results, as searching for just “Jack and Jill” with quotes only nets me 9M.) Google ngram shows zero hits for “Jack and Jill bathroom.” I don’t doubt it’s a known term, but just googling the words – especially if you did it without quotes – doesn’t necessarily say much.
ETA: Sorry – ngram is case sensitive. It’s a flat plot for “Jack and Jill bathroom” until 2000, when the term starts to take off in print.
We renovated our basement several years ago. We had, and still have, young kids. We converted a very large room in the basement to be a future bedroom for myself and my spouse, but it is for now a giant playroom (and now school room) for the kids. We put in a bathroom that is attached to the bedroom/playroom, but we also made it accessible from the laundry room. It makes sense to have it accessible that way now, but it may be kind of weird once the big room is in use as the main suite. I don’t know what it would be called in a real estate listing.
Also, I once lived in a rental house with a roommate, which had a very strange set up. There were two, roughly equal sized bedrooms, plus kitchen and living room. The only bathroom in the house was between the two bedrooms, accessible only by walking through one or the other. So, “Jack and Jill” but also the only one. Very weird for guests.
I know what the term means, but it sounds very outdated to me. If I were describing one, hoping for likely renters to understand, I wouldn’t use that term. I’d probably say shared bathroom or something like that. And if it was that particular set up, it would need further explanation anyway.
I think it’s because you’re using Google ngram, which is searching a much limited amount of content (printed text), versus using just vanilla Google. I get 111m hits for “Jack and Jill”, and 12.4m for “Jack and Jill bathroom” (no quotes on either).
Yeah, but a no quotes search WAYYYY overestimates results. You’re not supposed to do phrasal searches like that. Even so, I’m not entirely sure “Jack and Jill bathroom” in quotes is a completely verbatim search anymore (I feel like it once was – or at least it was on some search engines, like alltheweb.com).
(Jack and Jill bathroom with no quotes nets me 11.6M)
Not to mention their (and the Coast Guard’s) master chief petty officers and the other services’ master sergeants.
A discussion about married people with bachelor’s degrees would be too off-topic for this thread, right?
Had one in the barracks I lived in back in '86 and '87, and in my hospital room a few months ago, but I don’t think I’ve ever actually seen one in a house – though I’ve been seeing them in floor plans ever since I became interested in reading them ~55 years ago.
I meant of course that I’ve never seen an actual one in real life - although the truth is, until today, I always assumed the one on The Brady Bunch also had a door to the hallway. Probably because I couldn’t imagine a house that had at least three bathrooms back then.
I feel like I’ve probably seen one in real life – I can’t place where – does it count if there’s two doors, but one goes to the hallway and the other to a bedroom? but I’ve never watched an episode of The Brady Bunch in my life, or rather not enough of an episode that I could remember anything like a Jack and Jill in one. ETA: Actually, now that I think of it, I think my brother-in-law’s house has one (out East), and as far as I know, that’s the only one I’ve seen.
When I first saw the term in this thread, my guess was that it referred to paired back-to-back bathrooms, each going to a different bedroom, decorated in stereotypical male and female fashions – probably one of them in pink and the other in blue.
The actual description is a lot less silly, though the term is still silly.
@doreen, the house I grew up in had three bathrooms by 1950 or earlier. It was unusual at the time, especially for farmhouses, but not unheard of. (Probably it was partly due to the house having been used for a while as a two-family.)
There is another kind I’ve seen, where the walk-through bathroom leads from the master bedroom to the utility room. Specifically in houses being sold to retired couples. The whole thing was wheel-chair accessible, and was clearly the kind of en-suite you have when you don’t want your en-suite to be a cul-de-sac with limited access only through the bedroom.
I’ve never seen the rooms named with regards to size and I think that would be a little strange. The reason we are giving them discreet names is for clarity of communication during construction and it might be a little bit confusing for Bedroom 2 and Bedroom 3 to be on the opposite end of the house.
These were the room names used during construction and reflected on the blueprints. At some point, we would transition to what we called “user friendly room names”.
Now, there are very few professions where the names your client uses for the various rooms in his house are important. Mine was one of them - I worked in high-end home automation and we designed the touchscreen pages for the house ( which might have as many as 50 or 60 rooms).
The secondary bedrooms were usually named after the children occupying them or called Guest Room #. We did usually call the Master Bedroom “Master Bedroom” if it was occupied by a couple, otherwise it became Joe’s Room or Janes’s Room. We also used the naming process to coordinate the names of all the various Living Rm’s Family Room’s, Playrooms, Dens, Studies, Offices, Lounges, Studios, Exercise Rm’s, Billiard Rm’s, Gyms and Bars and whatever other names people gave the various hangout rooms in the common areas of a very large home.
I have observed a recent trend towards multiple Master Bedrooms in large vacation homes. Sometimes the owners are looking to entice their adult children (and their families) to visit frequently - other owners figure it might make the house easier to sell if it’s built to accommodate multiple families.
It’s stupid. Realtors also are either prohibited or discouraged from saying things like “walkable neighborhood” (wheelchairs, people!) and other terms that may offend one in 10 billion people.
Preach it, bro! But this also gets to the very heart of my problem with pretentious Political Correctness™. Even if they were allowed to say “walkable”, these freaking euphemisms still leave me perplexed about their real meaning, which is why I so object to even further obfuscation of the language. I mean, WTF is a “walkable neighborhood”, really? I definitely know what a “walkable dog” is – it’s one that you can walk with a minimum of fuss.
Not being accustomed to what might be US terminology, I genuinely don’t know whether “walkable neighborhood” is supposed to mean one that is safe, where you’re not likely to get mugged, or one that has lots of wide unobstructed sidewalks, or one that has scenic parks, or something else entirely. My whole obsession with language is the wish that people would say what they mean, and stop encrypting it in some sort of code to either try to make it out to be something that it isn’t, or out of fear of offending someone.