Toilet paper is a soft tissue paper product primarily used to maintain personal hygiene after human defecation or urination. It is typically sold as a long strip of perforated paper wrapped around a cardboard core, to be stored in a dispenser adjacent to a toilet. Most modern toilet paper in the developed world is designed to decompose in septic tanks, whereas some other bathroom and facial tissues are not. Toilet paper can be one-, two- or three-ply, or even thicker, meaning that it is either a single sheet or multiple sheets placed back-to-back to make it thicker, softer, stronger and more absorbent.
The use of paper for such hygiene purposes has been recorded in China in the 6th century, with specifically manufactured toilet paper being mass produced in the 14th century. Modern commercial toilet paper originated in the 19th century, with a patent for roll-based dispensers being made in 1883.
Different names, euphemisms and slang terms are used for toilet paper in countries around the world, including "bumf," "bum wad," "loo roll/paper," "bog roll," "toilet roll," "dunny roll/paper," "bathroom/toilet tissue," "TP," "arsewipe," and just "tissue."
Read more about Toilet Paper: History, Description, Mechanics
Famous quotes containing the words toilet and/or paper:
“Dandyism does not even consist, as many thoughtless persons appear to believe, in an immoderate taste for the toilet and material elegance. These things are for the perfect dandy only symbols of the aristocratic superiority of his mind.”
—Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867)
“The fate of the country does not depend on how you vote at the polls,—the worst man is as strong as the best at that game; it does not depend on what kind of paper you drop into the ballot- box once a year, but on what kind of a man you drop from your chamber into the street every morning.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)