apartment
Americannoun
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apartments
plural
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a room or a group of related rooms, among similar sets in one building, designed for use as a dwelling.
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a building containing or made up of such rooms.
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any separated room or group of rooms in a house or other dwelling.
We heard cries from an apartment at the back of the house.
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British. apartments, a set of rooms used as a dwelling by one person or one family.
noun
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(often plural) any room in a building, usually one of several forming a suite, esp one that is spacious and well furnished and used as living accommodation, offices, etc
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another name (esp US and Canadian) for flat 2
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( as modifier )
apartment building
apartment house
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Other Word Forms
Derived Forms
Inflected Forms
Nouns
Etymology
Origin of apartment
1635–45; < French appartement < Italian appartamento, equivalent to apparta ( re ) to separate, divide (verbal derivative of a parte apart, to one side) + -mento -ment
Explanation
An apartment is a private residence in a building or house that's divided into several separate dwellings. An apartment can be one small room or several. An apartment is a flat — it's usually a few rooms that you rent in a building. Your apartment might be in a fancy high rise with a doorman and an elevator, or over your parents' garage. Since the 1640s, an apartment has meant "separate rooms within a house," from the Italian word appartimento, which literally means "a separated place."
Vocabulary lists containing apartment
Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
See Examples For:
The Vatican said that Pope Leo "will leave the hospital in the early afternoon and return to the Vatican. Tomorrow he will recite the Angelus prayer from the window of the papal apartment".
From Barron's ● Oct. 17, 2026
I had invited them into my apartment expecting an awkward demonstration, but the work was remarkably thorough and spared me from having to do it myself.
From MarketWatch ● Oct. 16, 2026
On July 3, 1926, Marie Weirich celebrated her 40th birthday at the family apartment.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Oct. 16, 2026
Here is how her two new plastic pals fared when cleaning her apartment, which included a special challenge.
From MarketWatch ● Oct. 16, 2026
Will the people who move into our old apartment get it?
From "The Tenth Mistake of Hank Hooperman" by Gennifer Choldenko
The giant property stocks, real-estate investment trusts that own hundreds of thousands of apartments and single-family homes across the country, have been plunging for months.
From MarketWatch ● Oct. 9, 2026
Such is the demand for them that some public apartments are allocated by lottery.
From Barron's ● Oct. 8, 2026
People have paid for apartments that were never delivered.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Oct. 6, 2026
Later plans to transform the fire-damaged church into 18 apartments also did not come to fruition.
From BBC ● Oct. 3, 2026
Even if they couldn’t get into one of the apartments, the walkway would be someplace out of the rain.
From "Two Degrees" by Alan Gratz
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Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
