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furniture

American  
[fur-ni-cher] / ˈfɜr nɪ tʃər /

noun

  • furniture
    plural
  1. the movable articles, as tables, chairs, desks or cabinets, required for use or ornament in a house, office, or the like.

  2. fittings, apparatus, or necessary accessories for something.

  3. equipment for streets and other public areas, as lighting standards, signs, benches, or litter bins.

  4. Also called bearer.  Also called dead metalPrinting. pieces of wood or metal, less than type high, set in and about pages of type to fill them out and hold the type in place in a chase.


furniture British  
/ ˈfɜːnɪtʃə /

noun

  1. the movable, generally functional, articles that equip a room, house, etc

  2. the equipment necessary for a ship, factory, etc

  3. printing lengths of wood, plastic, or metal, used in assembling formes to create the blank areas and to surround the type

  4. the wooden parts of a rifle

  5. obsolete the full armour, trappings, etc, for a man and horse

  6. the attitudes or characteristics that are typical of a person or thing

    the furniture of the murderer's mind

  7. informal someone or something that is so long established in an environment as to be accepted as an integral part of it

    he has been here so long that he is part of the furniture

  8. See door furniture street furniture

"Collins English Dictionary — Complete & Unabridged" 2012 Digital Edition © William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd. 1979, 1986 © HarperCollins Publishers 1998, 2000, 2003, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2009, 2012

Other Word Forms

Derived Forms

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Nouns

Etymology

Origin of furniture

1520–30; < French fourniture, derivative of fournir to furnish

Explanation

The chairs, tables, sofas, and beds in your house are furniture. Your furniture gives you somewhere to sit, store your books, and a comfortable place to sleep at night. Furniture can be defined as the things in your house that you can move around — you can rearrange the furniture in your living room to make room for a piano, for example. Humans have been building and using some form of furniture for thousands of years. Furniture comes from the Middle French fourniture, "a supply," or "an act of furnishing."

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Vocabulary lists containing furniture

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:

With no budget to buy furniture, “all I had was a bed and a tiny two-seater kitchen table,” Roe recalled.

From MarketWatch Aug. 26, 2026

But Vietnam imports far fewer goods from the U.S.—just as Americans increasingly rely on the Southeast Asian country to keep the price of their electronics, furniture and sneakers low.

From The Wall Street Journal Aug. 26, 2026

Staff pushed furniture aside and crammed into the cafeteria inside the company’s sleek, open-air headquarters as executives took the stage.

From The Wall Street Journal Aug. 22, 2026

Some dragged trailers loaded with bedding, furniture and building material.

From BBC Aug. 21, 2026

I thought about the ladies featured in magazines wearing sequined dresses and feather boas, the yellow Packard on the movie set earlier today, the patterned velvet and scrolled-arm furniture in the department store windows.

From "The Red Car to Hollywood" by Jennie Liu

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