furniture
Americannoun
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the movable articles, as tables, chairs, desks or cabinets, required for use or ornament in a house, office, or the like.
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fittings, apparatus, or necessary accessories for something.
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equipment for streets and other public areas, as lighting standards, signs, benches, or litter bins.
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Also called bearer. Also called dead metal. Printing. 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.
noun
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the movable, generally functional, articles that equip a room, house, etc
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the equipment necessary for a ship, factory, etc
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printing lengths of wood, plastic, or metal, used in assembling formes to create the blank areas and to surround the type
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the wooden parts of a rifle
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obsolete the full armour, trappings, etc, for a man and horse
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the attitudes or characteristics that are typical of a person or thing
the furniture of the murderer's mind
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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
Other Word Forms
Derived Forms
Inflected Forms
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."
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.
He paused before the fire-scorched carcass of what appeared to have once been a furniture shop.
From Los Angeles Times • Aug. 9, 2025
The owner of one of them, a furniture shop, said it had been shocking to learn of the scale of the damage.
From BBC • Jul. 14, 2024
“I dream that the supreme leader allows talks and better relations with the U.S.,” said Mohsen, 29, a furniture shop salesman in northern Tehran.
From Seattle Times • Aug. 24, 2023
The seller, a secondhand furniture shop called Wannasofa, was so overwhelmed with calls after Mr. Rom’s tweet that the store gave him a 25 percent discount.
From New York Times • Feb. 25, 2023
The hunting trail began where they’d said, between an abandoned haircutter’s hut and a cluster of charred bed frames marking a looted furniture shop.
From "Endangered" by Eliot Schrefer
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.
