museum
Americannoun
-
museums
plural
noun
Other Word Forms
Derived Forms
Inflected Forms
Nouns
Etymology
Origin of museum
1605–15; < Latin mūsēum place sacred to the Muses, building devoted to learning or the arts (referring especially to the scholarly institute founded in Alexandria about 280 b.c.) < Greek Mouseîon, equivalent to Moûs ( a ) Muse + -eion suffix of place
Explanation
A museum is a place where interesting objects are displayed — like paintings, historical documents, and dinosaur skeletons. There are all kinds of museums. Art museums are some of the most well-known, such as the Louvre in Paris. The Natural History Museum, with its dinosaur skeletons and stuffed bears and lions, is one of New York's most famous. In Washington, DC, the Smithsonian is a group of impressive museums. Around the country, there are museums dedicated to sports, African-American culture, spies, and just about everything else. At any museum, you'll find a lot of tourists.
Vocabulary lists containing museum
"A Suitcase of Seaweed" and "Immigrants Today"
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Unit 5
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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:
While the house is bursting with artwork that would make most museum curators envious, Herman’s home is surprisingly humble, built on a tight budget from prosaic materials.
From Los Angeles Times ● Oct. 6, 2026
Lacking the necessary technology and expertise to answer that question, museum curators stored the mysterious fragments while competing explanations remained unresolved.
From Science Daily ● Oct. 6, 2026
The Beatles’ “Rubber Soul” has gotten the special deluxe treatment, with a bevy of new editions on CD, vinyl and Blu-ray and a museum show’s worth of expertly curated material released Friday.
From Los Angeles Times ● Oct. 6, 2026
She said they had gone to see “Schindler’s List” and the Dallas Holocaust museum: “It was divine intervention that she was brought into my life,” she said in an interview.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Oct. 5, 2026
That evening, he returned to Apollinaire’s apartment with a stone head from the Louvre—the museum, not the department store.
From "The Mona Lisa Vanishes" by Nicholas Day
According to government figures from 2023–2024, 43 percent of visitors to national museums were foreigners.
From Barron's ● Sep. 29, 2026
The UK government said on Tuesday that national museums would remain free for foreign visitors, after previously floating the idea of charging tourists an entry fee to buoy the cash-strapped sector.
From Barron's ● Sep. 29, 2026
It has helped experts discover that fossils in museums across the continent had been wrongly grouped and were actually made up of two different species - Saurichthys and Birgeria.
From BBC ● Sep. 28, 2026
The post-2020 shift extended to the various museums, which started to reopen to visitors in spring 2021.
From Salon ● Sep. 25, 2026
The child’s parents regularly take him to museums.
From "Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything" by Steven D. Levitt
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.
