All lounged out

The misuse of the word “lounge”

“Lounge,” to my mind is a word that conjures laziness. “Lounging around” is something one did as a teenager and in the process annoyed one’s parents and school teachers.

“Lounge” is a word that is often misused in other contexts. When I think of a “lounge,” I link it to either an airport or railway station. It is somewhere to sit whilst waiting for something else to occur. It is a place to wait for a plane or train but more frequently one finds it being used, especially by estate agents, to describe the main entertaining room in a house. In my view, a better description of such a space might be, in a casual context, a “sitting” or “living” room or, more formally, a “drawing room.”