n a place (usually in a railway station) where you can dump your belongings for a time while you bumble around shopping, or whatever takes your fancy.

n attic. The small space in the rafters of your house where you keep letters from your ex-lovers and all of your school books, just in case they might ever come in handy again. The word “attic” is also used in the U.K.

n restroom. The derivation comes from a long time ago. As derivations often do, now I think about it. What a lot of nonsense there is in here. Anyway, back then people used to shout “gardez l’eau” (the French equivalent of “look out for the water”) and throw their human waste out of the window onto gutters in the street. Of course, it wasn’t water at all, but perhaps we were all a bit too posh to shout “gardez le merde.” Another almost definitely spurious etymology is that in large mansions the toilet was always numbered room one-hundred to save any embarrassing confusions.

n a short, narrow (often cobbled) street. The word traditionally meant a stable that had been converted into a house, but is now only used to refer to the sort of street they would have been on. Mews houses in central London tend to afford some peace and quiet, and are therefore highly sought after and breathtakingly expensive.

n liquor store. The term comes from the fact that the alcohol can be sold on the condition that it may only be drunk off the premises.

n boarding school for children from ages eight to thirteen.

n bar. An abbreviation for “public house.” However, in my experience, British pubs are generally far more sociable than American bars. While you would go into a pub to have a pleasant lunch with your family or one or two sociable beers with a couple of friends, you’d only go into a bar in order to get blind drunk and then start a fight or have sex with something.

n I wrote a whole chapter about this earlier on, and I’m not writing it again. It begins on page 21.

n pre-university education – in the U.K. they call university, well, university.

n store. What Americans call “shops,” the Brits call “workshops” or “garages.”

n candy store. Derived from the word “shop,” which means “store.” And also the word “tuck.”

n a house with two rooms upstairs and two downstairs. A one-up, one-down is an even smaller house.

n college. As well as having the “University of St. Andrews” in the same way that Americans would have the “University of Oklahoma,” Brits use university as a general term to describe those sorts of institutions: I’m still at university at the moment. Brits do not use the word “college” in that context.