landlord
Americannoun
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landlords
plural
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a person or organization that owns and leases apartments to others.
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a person who owns and leases land, buildings, etc.
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a person who owns or runs an inn, lodging house, etc.
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a landowner.
noun
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a man who owns and leases property
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a man who owns or runs a lodging house, pub, etc
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archaic the lord of an estate
Other Word Forms
Derived Forms
Inflected Forms
Nouns
Etymology
Origin of landlord
before 1000; Middle English; Old English landhlāford. See land, lord
Explanation
If you lease an apartment, the person to whom you pay rent is your landlord. A landlord owns a house, building, or property and rents it out to other people. Many people have landlords they call when their drains are clogged and mail their rent checks to on the first of each month. Business owners often have landlords too, who own their retail or office spaces. Men and women can both be landlords, although you can also call a female landlord a landlady. The concept of a landlord goes back to feudalism — the lord part comes from "Lord of the Manor."
Vocabulary lists containing landlord
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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.
See Examples For:
The only person who saw her those two days was her landlord.
From Salon ● Oct. 10, 2026
Tishman Speyer, a commercial landlord, said it and other investors will inject $235 million into the property to refurbish its aging interior and exterior.
From Barron's ● Oct. 7, 2026
Lever said her daughter had visited her social landlord to say she was in danger but had been told she did not meet the criteria for emergency housing.
From BBC ● Oct. 5, 2026
The landlord portrayed itself as a tech company and snagged a private valuation of $47 billion.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Oct. 2, 2026
About an hour later, our landlord came by our apartment.
From "Crenshaw" by Katherine Applegate
Renters could also wind up paying more after landlords pass along rising costs, Berner said.
From MarketWatch ● Oct. 8, 2026
In some cases, their landlords were demanding 30% more.
From MarketWatch ● Oct. 6, 2026
Redevelopment of Clune Park had been delayed for years due to a stand-off between private landlords and the local council, leaving the site frozen in time with just a handful of tenants remaining.
From BBC ● Oct. 6, 2026
Mazariegos said homeless prevention starts with enforcing a “huge list” of the city’s tenant rights laws, including rent control and prohibitions against landlords harassing tenants.
From Los Angeles Times ● Oct. 1, 2026
They imagined what it would be like for Imm Janan, their landlords sleepy wife, to discover her hen wearing a lavish robe, as if she'd been crowned queen at midnight.
From "Habibi" by Naomi Shihab Nye
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Get a wordDefinitions 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.
