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:
Li visited Hong Kong during the Lunar New Year earlier this year, months after a massive apartment blaze in the north-eastern Tai Po district claimed 168 lives.
From BBC ● Aug. 21, 2026
The foursome had gathered in an apartment on Wilcox Avenue early on July 24 when an argument broke out, according to police.
From Los Angeles Times ● Aug. 19, 2026
Vogel bought an apartment for her daughter when she was 16, Panettiere recalled, and the whole family lived in it.
From Salon ● Aug. 19, 2026
Many apartment buildings in the country have such facilities in their basements.
From BBC ● Aug. 18, 2026
The apartment building they’d hit was like a thousand others Natalie had seen in Miami—rectangular and boxy and three stories tall.
From "Two Degrees" by Alan Gratz
When we meet Leonie, a travel writer in her early 30s, and Max, a translator almost a decade older, they have been a couple for four years but still keep separate apartments in Chicago.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Aug. 21, 2026
He ended up working in real estate, and in 1996 founded Evergrande, which threw itself into mass development, building in-demand apartments across China and capitalising on its rapid wealth accumulation.
From Barron's ● Aug. 20, 2026
"If I had known it was not so good I would not have bought so many apartments," he says now.
From BBC ● Aug. 11, 2026
That idea sent me down a rabbit hole involving real-estate agents, tiny shoebox apartments and frustrating chats with mortgage brokers.
From MarketWatch ● Aug. 10, 2026
But they left their wealth behind when they moved to America, settling instead for tiny apartments and whatever jobs they could get.
From "Americanized" by Sara Saedi
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.
