lean-to
Americannoun
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lean-tos
plural
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a shack or shed supported at one side by trees or posts and having an inclined roof.
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a roof of a single pitch with the higher end abutting a wall or larger building.
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a structure with such a roof.
noun
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a roof that has a single slope with its upper edge adjoining a wall or building
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a shed or outbuilding with such a roof
Other Word Forms
Noun Inflected Forms
Etymology
Origin of lean-to
1425–75; late Middle English; noun use of verb phrase lean to
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:
Our home was a compact, two-story terraced house with a back garden and a little lean-to greenhouse.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Apr. 21, 2026
Officials had also said there was a lean-to — a type of crude shelter — near the campsite, indicating they tried to escape the elements.
From Los Angeles Times ● Sep. 1, 2023
There were personal belongings and tarps at the scene, and a lean-to built from local logs over a firepit.
From Seattle Times ● Jul. 12, 2023
At night she sleeps in an unheated lean-to.
From New York Times ● May 17, 2022
Their eyes flew over the broken birdbath, the Crumbling statue of Diana the Huntress, and the stack of fancy wooden porch pillars, and came to rest on something in the lean-to shack.
From "The Egypt Game" by Zilpha Keatley Snyder
Her attention was fixed on a highway underpass nearby, where a handful of people were living in tents and cardboard lean-tos.
From Seattle Times ● Jun. 14, 2022
Roughly 93,000 inhabitants, many of them refugees from Central America, live there in illegal squatter settlements inside roughly built lean-tos, tents and ad hoc shacks made from scavenged refuse.
From New York Times ● Sep. 2, 2021
Now there are at least 70 - lean-tos, makeshift shelters and tents of different sizes - spreading out from a restroom building at what was once a popular picnic pavilion.
From Washington Times ● Feb. 16, 2020
They lived at first in crude lean-tos in the ruins of Hampton, burned by its own residents rather than leave it to the Union.
From Washington Post ● Aug. 21, 2019
When the buckboard topped the rise Adam could look down on the little cluster of buildings which composed the Hamilton seat—a house with many lean-tos, a cow shed, a shop, and a wagon shed.
From "East of Eden" by John Steinbeck
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.
