apartment
Pluralapartments
- 1A complete home that takes up only part of a larger building, often one available for rent.
She signed a lease on a one-bedroom apartment downtown.
The building has twelve apartments on each floor.
UsageYou live in an apartment; the whole block is an apartment building. British English usually says flat.
- 2A suite of rooms within a residence set aside for a particular person or persons, including a bedroom.
The countess withdrew to her apartment after the evening's entertainment.
Servants prepared the visiting prince's apartments before his arrival.
Note
An older sense of private quarters inside a larger household: a set of rooms, bedroom included, belonging to one person or party. Gulliver, describing Lilliput in Swift's 1726 book, peers from the inmost court at "the most splendid apartments that can be imagined." In older prose, do not picture a rented flat here, because the rooms share one roof and one household. It lives on in palaces, as in the state apartments of a royal residence; elsewhere it sounds old-fashioned.
Checked 6 Nov 2026 · 6 facts
- The older sense denotes rooms within a residence assigned to particular people, including a bedroom. en.wiktionary.org
- The work containing the Lilliput passage was first published in 1726. en.wikipedia.org
- Lemuel Gulliver, the fictional narrator of Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, peers into the apartments. en.wikipedia.org
- The narrator reaches the inmost court. gutenberg.org
- The quoted wording describing the apartments is exact. gutenberg.org
- Royal residences have state apartments. rct.uk
- 3A division of an enclosed space that is kept separate from the others; a compartment.
Note
This obsolete sense reflects the root idea of separation: a partitioned section of a box or enclosure. The 1883 ruling Slawson v. Grand Street R. Co. describes a streetcar fare-box "consisting of two apartments, the one directly above the other." Compartment now does this work, and apartment would be confusing in this sense today.
Less common meaning
- 4In the COM threading architecture, a conceptual space that keeps objects separate, so objects in one cannot directly access those in another and must go through a proxy.
Use it in a sentence
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Origin
Spanish apartamiento, meaning "separation, seclusion," became Italian appartamento and then French appartement, which English took. The word apart is related.