Decadent Romans, the story goes, would gorge themselves at banquets, slip off to a special room called the vomitorium to throw it all up, then waddle back to eat more. It is the perfect image of imperial excess, and the word sounds exactly like what it supposedly describes.
A vomitorium is architecture, not a vomiting room. The word comes from the Latin 'vomere', to spew forth, and it referred to the wide passageways in amphitheatres and stadiums through which crowds were 'disgorged' out to their seats and back to the exits. The Colosseum had dozens of them, and the term is still used by architects for stadium exit tunnels today. There is no good evidence Romans had dedicated puke-rooms; the idea comes from later writers misreading the word and projecting their own ideas of Roman gluttony. Some Romans certainly overate and some certainly vomited, because humans are humans, but they did not build a room for it and name it after spewing. The vomitorium moved people, not lunch.
Reception
- Online Etymology Dictionary: vomitoryREFERENCE
- Wikipedia: VomitoriumREFERENCE