A
drawing room is a
room in a house where visitors may be entertained. The name is derived from the sixteenth-century terms
withdrawing room and
withdrawing chamber, which remained in use through the seventeenth century, and made their first written appearance in 1642. In a large sixteenth- to early eighteenth-century English house, a withdrawing room was a room to which the owner of the house, his wife, or a distinguished guest who was occupying one of the main apartments in the house could "withdraw" for more privacy. It was often off the
great chamber (or the great chamber's descendant, the
state room or salon) and usually led to a formal, or "state" bedroom.