anteroom
Americannoun
Etymology
Origin of anteroom
Explanation
An anteroom is a small room or entryway leading to a larger area. You might wait with a tour group in an anteroom before beginning your tour of a castle. You can use the word anteroom as a fancy, old-fashioned way to say "waiting room" or "vestibule." Museum visitors might pause in an anteroom before entering a large gallery, and the butler in an old movie might say, "Please wait in the anteroom." Another word for an anteroom is an antechamber — in fact the French root of both is antichambre, from the Latin anticamera, "room in front."
Vocabulary lists containing anteroom
Coraline
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Florida's B.E.S.T. Roots: ante, anti
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"The Crucible," Vocabulary from the play
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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.
He wasn’t a man to sit idly in death’s anteroom, awaiting the grim reaper.
From The Wall Street Journal ● May 13, 2026
One space, the first floor anteroom, is lined with red and gold silk, with centuries-old paintings hanging on the walls and an elaborately decorative fireplace standing beside a huge floor-to-ceiling window.
From BBC ● Sep. 16, 2025
Elliott notes that a Picasso painting hangs in the anteroom of a prominent political family’s Washington, D.C., bathroom.
From Los Angeles Times ● Jun. 30, 2025
The manager and another staffer ushered her mother and sister into an anteroom that wasn't large enough for the three of them and peppered Ani with questions about her mother's mental stability.
From Salon ● Dec. 6, 2024
She expected to find a curtained anteroom, but there was nothing there.
From "Coraline" by Neil Gaiman
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
