What's a vomitorium for?

A "vomitorium," despite being derived from the Latin "vomere," meaning, "to spew forth," isn't the place where the Romans threw up after their meals. It was the name for the entrance or exit from an amphitheater, and is still used in that sense today in some sports stadiums.

The "vomitoria" of the Colosseum in Rome were so well designed that it's said the venue, which seated at least 50,000, could fill in fifteen minutes. (There were eighty entrances at ground level.)

The confusion of the exit with a specialized vomit chamber appears to be a recent error. The earliest citation in the Oxford English Dictionary finds Alduous Huxley using the term incorrectly in his comic novel, Antic Hay, with the stern comment "erron." However, no Roman writer ever referred to a chamber where gluttons threw up to be able to eat even more, no have any such rooms been found.