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Is it correct to write "the adjacent room" even if there are multiple adjacent rooms?

English Language & Usage Asked on August 26, 2020

Recently, I posted a puzzle on Puzzling.SE.

The puzzle describes a prison containing thousands of hallways which all run next to each other, like the pipes in a pan flute. In my description of the prison, I wrote that most of the hallways have a door which leads to the adjacent hallway.

Someone wrote in the comments that my use of the word “the” is incorrect. After all, most of the hallways have two adjacent hallways, and so I can’t write “the adjacent hallway”; I have to write “an adjacent hallway” or “one of the adjacent hallways”.

However, I could swear that it’s reasonably common in English to write things like “the adjacent room” and “the adjacent lot” even when there are multiple adjacent rooms and multiple adjacent lots, and no way for the reader to determine exactly which room or lot was meant.

I could very easily imagine someone saying “I was lecturing once when I heard a strange noise from the adjacent classroom”, even when there are two adjacent classrooms; and “there are trees on the line between this lot and the adjacent lot”, even when there are several adjacent lots. To me, if you replace “the” with “an” in either of those examples, it sounds bit like you’re trying to draw the reader’s attention to the existence of a new classroom or lot that they weren’t aware of before.

Is my thinking correct? Is it really appropriate to write “the adjacent room” when there are several adjacent rooms, or am I just imagining things?

I’m interested primarily in whether or not “the” is actually used this way by careful writers, not in what textbooks for English students have to say about the matter.

One Answer

I've found several uses of the phrase "the adjacent room", in cases where there are multiple adjacent rooms and no way of identifying a particular one, in printed books from mainstream publishers.

Given these citations, I can only conclude that this usage is perfectly grammatical and correct.

All of these are from Google Books.

Jones, Thomas J. A. Professional Management of Housekeeping Operations. United Kingdom, Wiley, 2007, p. 216:

[...] engineer with a bolt cutter in preparation for cutting the chain on the door.

There are two specific exceptions to the concerns stated, both of which should be considered before using the emergency master key or the bolt cutter. The room may have been sold as part of a suite that adjoins the adjacent room.

Ermann, Michael. Architectural Acoustics Illustrated. United States, Wiley, 2015, p. 179:

Design rooms that are not noise sensitive as buffer zones between noisy spaces and quiet spaces. For instance, place a row of closets, utility rooms, vestibules, and bicycle storage rooms between residential units. Experience suggests that the room two-doors-down is much quieter than the adjacent room, so insert buffer rooms to effectively move noisy rooms “two doors down.”

Jellison, Judith. Including Everyone: Creating Music Classrooms Where All Children Learn. United States, Oxford University Press, 2015 (no page number):

We've also experienced times when we cannot concentrate on a task because of distracting sounds from others in the same room, from a malfunctioning heating or cooling system, or from musicians practicing in the adjacent room.

Answered by Tanner Swett on August 26, 2020

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