Room, Stay and Extras in Portuguese

The eleventh entry is a limpeza, glossed here as the cleaning, and the gloss is right for the sentence beside it and wrong for the next three. Portuguese keeps one noun for a stretch of ground English cuts into pieces. It is the work being done: a limpeza é feita todas as manhãs, the cleaning is done every morning. It is also the condition of being clean, and there the English word changes altogether — « the cleanliness of the room » is what a review scores, while « the cleaning of the room » would name the job and not the result. And inside a hotel it is a department with a word of its own: the card on the door, the trolley in the corridor and the button on the telephone all say « housekeeping », built on « house » and « keep » and saying nothing about dirt at all. The person is « the cleaner », and the bottles are « cleaning products ». So a senhora da limpeza is the cleaner, a limpeza do quarto era impecável is the cleanliness, and ligar para a limpeza is ringing housekeeping.