Roommate
|
|
A roommate is a person with whom one shares a room or rooms. Affectionately known as roomie. In most university dormitories, roommates are of the same sex. Cohabitants of apartments are also termed roommates. However, unmarried couples living together are generally *not* labelled roommates.
One of difficult tasks for the house office in college, is matching roommates for incoming freshmen. Some statistics show that the academic grades, study style, social behavior and personality of one roommate will affect the other roommate's academic performance.
Living with a roommate can mean much less privacy than having a room on your own, and for some people this can cause a lot of stress.
In Japan, people rarely live with roommates; perhaps given that most of houses are not designed in a way for strangers to share the house.
Roommates are a fairly common point of reference in Western culture, especially in North America. Therefore, many novels, movies, plays, and television programs employ roommates as a basic principle or a plot device.
See also the comic strip Roomies (comic).