dining room furniture names

hi. i'm vanessa from speakenglishwithvanessa.com. are you ready to expand your vocabulary? let's get started. do you want to improve your vocabulary? do you want to have fun? do you want to see my house? if you answered yes, yes, and yes, then todayyou're in luck because i want to help you understand and use over 40 essential householdwords, expressions, and phrasal verbs.

we're gonna go around to each of the roomsin my house and i'm gonna show you wants there and maybe what's not there but what maybeis typically there in other american households so that you can use those words. because in a video that i recently made calledhow to learn english at home, i mentioned that you can look around you and ask questionsabout your surroundings. "what's that? what's in that box? who is that?" well, the way that you can do this is if youhave the vocabulary to explain those things.

so i hope that today you'll be able to expandyour vocabulary even if you are an advanced english speaker, i'm sure that you're goingto use some useful expressions and you'll realize this is what native speakers reallyuse in real life instead of what they use in textbooks. so i challenge you, after this lesson, tryto go around your house and name things. you could even write down a label and putit around if your family members don't mind. this is a great way to expand your vocabulary. so pay attention, make some notes, and let'sget started. welcome to my kitchen.

i'm gonna just go around the room, and infact, i'm gonna go around the kitchen, the living room, the office, the bathroom, andthe bedroom. and we're gonna go step-by-step through thedifferent things that i see. i'm gonna name them. if they need any explanation, i'll try toexplain them. and i hope that it will be helpful to youas you expand your vocabulary. all right. let's start with the fridge. here's the fridge, or you can say refrigeratorif you want to be extra intense.

but we often just say fridge, pretty simple. on the top, you have the freezer. and my freezer's on top, sometimes freezersare on the bottom, or sometimes it's split down the middle and there's a freezer on oneside and a refrigerator, or fridge, on the other side. mine's just on the bottom. you can see i have a lot of magnets and pictureson my fridge. it's pretty typically. i have some magnets that some youtube subscriberssent me, some pictures, some magnets that

we've picked up as we've traveled. but this is pretty typical that you'll see,some personal mementos on the fridge. here, we have our dining room table. in the u.s., typically people will have adining room or maybe their kitchen will be a little bit bigger than mine because we livein an apartment. it's from the 1920s, so actually my apartmentand my house is quite different than what you would typically see if you visited someone'shouse in the u.s. but a lot of the items are the same. so if there's any differences from typicalhouses in the u.s., i'll try to explain that

to you as well. but here, we have the table. pretty simple. i bet you learned that in your, maybe, firstclass in english class. we have chairs, we usually call these kitchenchairs or if you have a separate dining room, you can call them dining room chairs. because we have a one-year-old, you're gonnasee a lot of different items around our house that are for our one-year-old. so here, we have his highchair.

his high chair attaches to the kitchen chairso it's a little bit different than a standalone highchair, that would be just a separate chair. but we don't have much room in our kitchen,so we have a portable highchair that attaches to a chair. next, let's move on to this table which iswhere we cut things and prepare our food. here, you can see a fruit tray, you mightcall it different things depending on what region of the u.s. you're from. at the moment, we only have two tangerineson the fruit tray. typically, we have more.

but we also have a coaster. this is where you put your cups or your mugs,usually hot or cold things to keep the table safe. we also have a coffee grinder for grindingbeans. and a sippy cup for our baby. and let's move along over here. on this side, we have our cheese grater. this is with a t, even though it sounds likea d. grater, it's a cheese grater. our knives.

we have some measuring cups in the u.s., weuse cups and tablespoons, and teaspoons to measure things. a lot of people have these in plastic, butours are cute little cats. and here, we have some condiments that weoften use when we're cooking, so we have them close by and handy. oh, we just have honey, some balsamic, somechopsticks, some salt, some olive oil, and of course, you can see my plants, which arenot doing too well. i don't have a green thumb, as they say. our plants often die.

so they don't have a good future looking aheadof them. this is our oven where we cook and bake things. typically, we call the top the stove top orthe stove. and there's four burners on this stove top. and we have some knobs for turning on thestove. inside is the oven. often, i'll just say the oven to mean thefull stove, or this full device. but you can kind of use them interchangeably. some people are sticklers about that kindof thing.

sticklers means picky, picky about those kindof terms. but, we often say oven, stove for this generaldevice. but technically, the top is the stove andinside is the oven. i have some pots and pans here. there's more under the counter. here, i have my glass lid because inside i'mmaking some butternut squash for lunch a little bit later. and my cutting board, i have a couple othercutting boards, but this one is my favorite, so it stays close by and handy.

on this side of the kitchen are the oven mittsand our spice rack. typically, people will say spice rack or spicecabinet is their inside a cabinet. we have, technically, it's a shelf, but wecall it the spice rack because all of the spices are there. i also have some tea and some cookbooks andsome miscellaneous things on that shelf as well. so this is something that's pretty differentfrom typical houses in the u.s., we have a sink, most places have a sink with a facet,we have the strainer, or colander, usually a strainer for straining pasta or other thingsthat we're washing.

but, we didn't have a dishwasher until aboutone month ago and it's because this is an old apartment, as i mentioned it's from the1920s, so there's not air conditioning, not regular heating, no dishwasher, no washeror dryer for our clothes. but we decided to buy a, you can see here,table top dishwasher. this is not typical in houses in the u.s.,but it's the same idea. typically, they're under the counter and it'skind of part of the furniture. but you can open the dishwasher and see thedish rack. here, we have some clean dishes and apparentlytoys that needed to be cleaned too. so we have the dosh rack and you put yourdishes in the dish rack.

and up here, i have a small dish rack justfor more fragile things like these mugs or these glasses. but you can hand dry things and put them inthe rack as well. so, that's just depending on what you havein your house. if you have a dishwasher, or if you need tohand wash things and then put them in the drying rack or in the rack. above the dishwasher, we have a cabinet wherewe keep put dry goods. so you can see we have some spices, some popcorn,things for baking, there's some pasta, some kind of leftover, dry goods that we put inthere to keep.

a lot of people will have what you call apantry. and a pantry is kind of like a closet whereyou keep dry goods, but our apartment is pretty small, it's old, we don't have a pantry. so, we just have a cabinet. beside the dishwasher, we have a toaster oven. and a lot of people will also have a microwave. in fact, i'd say 99% of americans have a microwave. we just don't have it because we don't havea lot of space, this is an old apartment, like i mentioned.

so there's a couple key elements. there's one more key element that you'll notsee in our house that i'll mention a little but, we have a toaster oven, a lot of peoplewill have a regular toaster and it will just have slots. so, we call this the toaster because it'sthe only one we have. but if you have a toaster with slots and atoaster oven, you probably need to be a little more specific and just say, "put it in thetoaster oven," or, "i put it in the toaster oven," just so people know which one it'sin. we have a paper towel rack, this is the papertowel rack, the metal piece.

and here are some paper towels for cleaningup things. and we also have a water kettle, a hot waterkettle for heating up water. so this is kind of like our little drink station. i have tea things, dan has some coffee things,we have some dish washing soap. this is where all of those kind of extra kitchenthings happen. and finally, it's a little bit awkward forme to show you with the camera because it's a little bit high up so i have to hold thecamera myself, but here we have our dishes. so we have big plates, little plates, youmight come across some specific words for different sizes of plates.

but in reality, we just say big plates, littleplates. we have some wine glasses, some regular glasses,tall glasses, short glasses, and bowls. a lot of people have different sizes of bowlsor different functions for different bowls. but, we keep it simple, bowls. up on top, as well, we have some mugs youcan see. we have a lot of mugs because i feel likechoosing the right mug for that moment is an important part of drinking a hot drink. i have to have the right mug. do i want the mug with birds on it?

do i want the mug with a rainbow on it? it just depends. and it kind of lends the experience, a richerfeeling, i don't know if you feel the same way about the mug that you drink your coffeeor your tea out of, but i feel like the mug is important to me. all right, let's go to the next room. when you first come into our house we havea shoe rack where we line up our shoes. and this is typical in some american houses,but in a lot of american houses, people keep their shoes on.

for us, we lived in korea for a couple years,so we got used to taking off our shoes. and we have a sign on the door that says,"please take off your shoes, we will appreciate it." but, a lot of our friends have never actuallylooked at the sign. and we don't tell them, "hey, take off yourshoes." we're pretty relaxed when it comes to guests. but for ourselves, we always take off ourshoes. if we need to run into the house for somethingquickly, then it's not a big deal. but, we have a shoe rack so that we can easilytake off our shoes and put them away when

we come in our house. welcome to our living room. there is one thing i'm gonna mention aboutour living room, maybe a couple things, but specifically one thing that you're not gonnasee in our living room that's pretty typical, and that's just a tv. you could say television, but we often justsay tv. why don't we have a tv? well, it was a conscious decision to not havea tv. first of all, because i'm not a big fan ofdifferent tv shows and it's just not that

enjoyable for me. but also, i feel like i don't wanna just haveit on and always be watching. anyway, we can talk about that another time. but, i want to let you know that it's prettytypical to see a tv in american households in their living room of you could say familyroom. some people say main room, some people sayden, kind of like a lion's den. this is like a cave, but people say den. i don't know if that's a southern word, butsome of my friends in the south say that. but we call this just the living room or themain room.

and that's where we spend a lot of our time. on this side of the living room, we have apiano, some shelves for displaying different things. you might hear this called knick-knacks. and that means sometimes sentimental things,sometimes just junk, but for us, we just try to keep only things that matter to us. so we have some sentimental items on our shelves. and on the piano there's some picture framesand another coaster. you might see as well that we have a lot ofbaby gates everywhere in our living room,

it blocks off the full living room. and that's because we have a one-year-old,so it keeps him safe, it keeps us sane, and maybe for you, if you have a baby you alsohave some baby gates. i highly doubt that you have a tent in yourliving room, but if you have a baby, if you have a kid that likes to play, maybe you havea tent. so we just have this tent with all of ourbaby's toys inside and he goes in there and plays and we play with him in there. and it's just part of our living space. now, let's go onto our bookshelf.

our bookshelf is one of the main items, mainpieces of furniture in our living room. we have the bookshelf, the couch, and thepiano. those are kind of the centerpieces of thisroom. so on our bookshelf, of course, we have books. they are somewhat organized by topic, notso much right now because i just tried to organize them there myself. but, on the bookshelf, we have some speakers,we have some other miscellaneous things up here like our pumpkins that are kind of rottingand we need to get rid of them. on the bottom, we have some toys for our baby.

so, the first two shelves are baby things. and then these shelves, that he can't reach,those are for us. so, we can say this a bookshelf and theseare shelves. this is where we lounge. this is the couch, and we call this a coffeetable even though we don't typically have coffee on it. but it usually just means that kind of smallishtable that's in the middle of your living room or close to the couch. you might be surprised that sometimes americansput their feet on this, i don't know if you

do this, but i know in some cultures it'sseen as extremely gross. but, you just prop your feet up on the coffeeable and kick back and relax. but, beside the coffee table, or behind thecoffee table, you can see we have a side table. i know this expression is really simple andit's kind of obvious. but if you wanted to know which table, youcould just say the side table, or the table beside the couch. and on the side table there's a lamp thatwe use to light our reading in the evening. on this side of our living room, we call thisjust our ikea chair because it came from ikea, but you might see people who have comfortablechairs like this in their living room.

you might see them calling them an easy chair. usually an easy chair is a little bit biggerthan this, a little bit more comfortable. or you might hear them call it a la-z-boy. they're not talking about how you're not studyingand you're not working hard. "i'm sitting on the lazy boy," no. it just means that when you sit on it, youfeel lazy, you feel comfortable. so a la-z-boy has a foot prop that comes upso you can completely relax and lay back. but for us, we just call this our ikea chair,it kind of bounces a little bit. it's not a rocking chair, it doesn't completelygo back and forth, but it has a little bit

of movement. we have here our windowsill. the windowsill is the place where we can putseasonal things or just some decorations if we want. and the window, here we have the inner window,it has some kind of maybe more old fashioned, 1920s style panels here. but, we also have inside our window anotherfeature, so let's get a little closer and take a look. most windows in the u.s. have a screen andthat's on the other side of this main window,

just to prevent mosquitoes and bugs comingin in the summer time. but because it's winter, we also have anotherpane, a windowpane that's down. it's the storm window. so here, you're only seeing the regular windowpane,but on the other side, we have a second layer that's called a storm window. and you could out it down in case of a storm,but typically, it's used in the wintertime, usually for older houses because older houseshave two layers of window. they don't have maybe some modern technologyfor the window structure. so we have a screen, a storm window, and justthis regular window inside.

before we leave this room, i just want toquickly talk about the basics of a room. we have, of course, the walls and the ceiling. but here, we have hardwood floors. we don't have any carpet in our house andthat's mainly because it's an older apartment, so it has wood. but also because we have two cats and a baby,so it's a little bit difficult to clean carpet. but, most american houses will have carpetsusually in the bedrooms or if they have an upstairs area in the upstairs. but some will have it, as well, in the mainroom or in the living room.

i think it's kind of becoming a more modernthing to have hardwood floors, kind of going back to that classic style. so you might see that, you might have thatin your house if you live in the u.s., but carpets and rugs, rugs are just removablesmall carpets. rugs and carpets are pretty typical, but wejust have hardwood floors. this is not laminate. in the kitchen, you saw laminate. laminate is just kind of like a plastic flooring,it's typically in kitchens because it's easy to clean.

but here, we have real wood, hardwood floors. welcome to our office, drum room, spare bedroom,a little bit of everything and another dying plant. and oh, we have dan. dan is working on editing a vocabulary videofor the fearless fluency club, if you'd like to learn with us, you can learn with us everymonth. but in this room, we have the office desk. we have the desktop computer, we have laptopsand whatnot as well, but the desktop is great for editing videos and having a big screen.

so he's sitting in an office chair and heis using some of the office equipment. how's it going? dan: it's going well. are you getting some inspiration from thefish? dan: obviously, in their huge ball of algaeover here. yup, yup. welcome to our bathroom. we have only one bathroom in our apartment. a lot of american houses have at least two,but our apartment is a good size for one bathroom.

typically, in the u.s. we say bathroom, inthe uk you're gonna hear people say toilet. but, in the u.s. we do not say toilet unlesswe're talking about the physical object, the toilet. so in the u.s., when you say toilet, you feela little bit dirty maybe because you're imagining the throne, that chair that you sit on. so it's a little bit weird in the u.s. ifyou say, "i'm going to go to the toilet." we can imagine that piece of furniture. so, it's a little bit better to say, "i'mgoing to the bathroom." we use the term restroom to talk about a publicplace.

some people might even say bathroom for apublic place. so maybe in a restaurant or maybe in a gasstation, or if you're driving on a road trip, there might be a rest stop and you go to therestroom inside the rest stop. those are the most typical expressions thatyou're gonna hear in the u.s., bathroom and restroom. but i would not say, "this is the restroom." if i said restroom at a friends house, "i'mgonna go to the restroom," it's quite formal and it seems a little bit weird like i'm tryingto be too formal, when really, i'm just going to the bathroom and it's my friends house.

so i recommend using restroom only for maybework places situations or for public places like restaurants or gas stations where you'regoing the bathroom. it's gonna be a little bit tricky to filmin here 'cause the bathroom's long and narrow, but we're gonna make it work. so here we have the shower. and we know it's a shower because we havea shower curtain. but in the u.s. you'll typically find twoshower curtains. on the outside there's on that has usuallya nice, pretty color on it. and then on the inside, you'll see a showercurtain liner.

and this is, i'll try to show you here, thisis on the inside of the bathtub. and that's to prevent water from spillingout. i know i visited some other countries thatdon't have shower curtains at all, and i found it quite difficult to take a shower withoutgetting the whole bathroom wet. so in the u.s. it's convenient. we've got a shower curtain and we have a showercurtain rod up here. you can see to hold the shower curtain. inside the shower, we have a bathtub. and you can take a bath in here, but mostpeople don't take a bath.

usually just kids take a bath. it's kind of small, it's not so comfortable,and it's not really part of american culture for adults to take a bath. you might see in some movies maybe a womanin the bathtub with a glass of wine and there's some candles, this is not typical at all. that hardly ever happens and we just don'treally soak in the bath. some people find it dirty to sit in the bathwater because maybe we don't clean the bathtubs as often as countries who take baths. here, we have, also, a shower rack.

you can see it's hanging on the shower head. the shower head is where the water comes out. we have the shower head, the shower rack,and up here we have our shampoo and conditioner and soap and whatnot. but we have the shower rack. moving on in the bathroom, we have a littletable here with some toiletries on the table. there's some lotions or contacts or toothpaste. these are things that you use to get readyin the morning or to get ready for bed, they're toiletries.

we have a soap dispenser and we have the sinkand a facet. and it's pretty typical that you'll see anoutlet as well in the bathroom. i know some countries don't have outlets inthe bathroom. it can be kind of dangerous to have an outletin the bathroom, so of course, just don't out your hairdryer in the sink. little word of wisdom. and it wouldn't be a bathroom without a toilet. so we have the toilet, we have toilet paper,and we have the handle for flushing the toilet. as well as usually two separate lids on thetoilet.

i know some countries don't have two separatelids, it's kind of an all in one combo, but in the u.s., we have two separate lids andusually a brush, a toilet brush for cleaning the toilet. and a plunger in case you need it. and don't forget, some more dying plants justto round out your full experience of our house. oh, i don't wanna forget, as well, we havethese hand towels. this hand towel is for drying your hands afteryou wash your hands. and a wash cloth. this is for washing your face.

oftentimes, a hand towel will have a littlering and it will be inside that ring, but we don't have that so we just hang it overthe shower curtain rod. welcome to my bedroom. the lighting is a little bit different inhere because we have some extreme blackout shades and blackout curtains so that we cansleep and so that our baby can sleep, especially when he takes a nap during the day. so you can see here on the window, we havesome black shades and also some black curtains that is essential and it has helped our livesso much. all right, let me show you around.

of course, the main feature of a bedroom isthe bed. here's our bed and we have a quilt on ourbed. this is something that dan's great grandmothermade, but you'll often simply see sheets in the summer time or maybe a thin blanket. but in the winter, you'll see a comforter. this is a thick, fuller type of blanket. in europe, a lot of people use a duvet, butin the u.s., i had actually never heard of a duvet until i went to europe. so it's not so common in the u.s., maybe i'mjust like in a little isolated bubble of people

who don't have duvets. so if you're in the u.s. let me know if youhave a duvet. but typically, you'll see a quilt of a comforter,or just some sheets. you'll see over here is my baby's crib. a lot of people in the u.s. who have a child,they have a separate room for their child. but, our apartment is small so we make dowith what we have. and he sleeps here in his crib. on this side, there is a nightstand. i have a nightstand as well over on this side.

the nightstand is the table that goes besideyour bed. and typically there's a lamp on the nightstand,maybe there's a drawer or a shelf and you can put some books or something in that nightstandthat you use when you're sleeping. this is our set of drawers. you might hear people say dresser drawers. this, i feel like is a little bit older english,like maybe my parents of my grandparents might say dresser drawers. but for me, i just say a set of drawers orit's in the drawer. this is a difficult word to pronounce, soi hope that you can say it clearly.

drawers, drawers. inside our closet you'll see some clothesthat are hanging up. we hang up the clothes in the closet or youcan say they're hanging in the closet. and they're hanging on what? they're hanging on hangers. a lot of words that have to do with hang thathave to do with the closet. so the clothes are hanging up in the closet. some people also fold their clothes up here,maybe some winter clothes or some pants that you don't wanna hang up.

one quick thing that i'd like to mention thatwe don't have put often typical american houses will, especially standalone houses, apartmentssometimes have this, sometimes don't, but a lot of houses have a master bath. or you can say master bathroom. and that's a bathroom that's connected tothe biggest bedroom. so typically, if you have a household of parentsand two children, the parents bedroom is the biggest bedroom and attached to the parentsbedroom is the master bath. in the house that i grew up in, my parentshad this, dan's parents had this as well. but in our apartment, we only have the onebathroom that i showed you.

so we don't have a master bath. it's just the bathroom of the house. so you might see this, and if you're in someone'shouse or if you're describing a house, or maybe you're buying a house or renting onin the u.s., you might hear that term mentioned, "there's a master bath," or, "there's a masterbathroom." both of those terms are the same thing, it'sjust a shortened version of bathroom. thanks so much for joining me in this ratherlong vocabulary video. i hope that it helped to refresh some wordsthat you've learned in the past and helped to add to your vocabulary so that you cango around your house and name and label some

things that you have in your house that yousee every day. it will help to reinforce those words. i wanna ask you a question. what is something that i didn't mention inthis video that you have in your house? let me know in the comments. what's an item in your house that i didn'tmention in this video. it can help to expand your vocabulary. i recommend reading other comments so thatyou can see things from other peoples houses that i didn't mention here.

just keep growing your vocabulary every day. thank you so much for learning english withme, and i'll see you again next friday for a new lesson here on my youtube channel. bye. the next step is to download my free e-book. five steps to becoming a confident englishspeaker. you'll learn what you need to do to speakconfidently and fluently. don't forget to subscribe to my youtube channelfor more free lessons. thanks so much, bye.

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