basement
Pluralbasements
- 1A floor of a building that sits wholly or partly below ground level.
The basement houses the boiler and the electrical panels.
Contractors waterproofed the basement walls before finishing the lower level.
Similarcellar
Note
Built plainly from base and -ment, the word names the floor that forms a building's base. It works freely in front of other nouns: basement stairs, basement walls, basement windows. Louis Joseph Vance's "An Outsider" (1914) sends a heroine groping toward the basement staircase in blinding darkness. When only part of the floor is sunk, the word may mean the half-buried semi-basement.
- 2The bottom position in a sports conference's standings, occupied by the worst-performing team.
After ten straight losses, the franchise sank to the basement of the Eastern Conference.
Climbing out of the basement will take more than one winning streak.
Oppositetop
Note
Sportswriters picture the standings table as a building, with the weakest team on the bottom floor. The verbs follow the image: teams sink to, languish in, or climb out of the basement. It is informal, at home on the sports page and in broadcasts rather than in official records. It nearly always takes the definite article: the basement of the conference.
- 3A mass of igneous or metamorphic rock that underlies and supports a covering platform of sedimentary rock.
Geologists mapped the basement beneath thousands of feet of sediment.
The continent's basement is exposed where erosion has stripped away the overlying rock.
Note
Geology carries the word down to the foundations of the crust. Here it describes the rock's position rather than its kind: igneous and metamorphic rock alike count as basement wherever they underlie a sedimentary platform. The usual collocations are basement rock and the basement beneath a basin. Rock is said to be exposed where erosion has stripped the overlying layers away.
- 4Ellipsis of semi-basement: a floor lying mostly, though not wholly, below ground level.
The shop occupies a basement whose upper windows rise just above the sidewalk.
Light floods the basement because half its height stands above grade.
Note
A clipped form: speakers drop the semi- of semi-basement, which is also written solid as semibasement, and let context carry the difference. Nothing in the shortened word signals that the floor is only partly below grade. In a lease, a listing or a building plan, where the distinction matters, the full compound is the clearer choice.
Practice
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Origin
Formed from "base" combined with the suffix "-ment."