tenement house
1
4.6
- noun
- /ˈtɛnəmənt haʊs/
:
casa de inquilinato
- By degrees, faces and forms appear on the page: a swooning woman (circa 1940), a cop who tries to catch her, a crowd of onlookers standing in the shadows of a tenement house in the aftermath of a murder.
Examples
-
When she moved to the city, she lived in a small tenement house that had no hot water and shared bathrooms.
-
We finally traced him to a cheap neighborhood... down on the Lower East Side of New York... where he was living, at the time, in a very sleazy, rundown tenement house.
-
Pasteur discovered the germ theory of disease in 1861, and yet only a few blocks away from Dr. Knight's home stood the tenement houses.
Academic text (2005) -
An old tenement house; all the upper floors were empty now, lifeless and petrified, just waiting for Dublin Corporation to paste up the posters proclaiming the house.
Fiction book (2000) -
It was apparently a copy of a law that had been enacted only the year before, proclaiming that it prohibited anyone from "the keeping of horses, cows, pigs, sheep, goats, or poultry in tenement houses..."
Fiction book (1993) -
Many families were displaced from their homes in the old tenement houses when the area was redeveloped.
-
The tenement house symbolized the struggles of the working-class families in the urban landscape.
Synonyms
27
4.8
A large building divided into small, cheap apartments that is often in poor condition
1
4.4
An apartment building where many people live in small, cramped rooms
Antonyms
How Run-down
Surface Forms
Morphology
This is a straightforward noun+noun compound: 'tenement' (a building with multiple low-cost apartments) combined with 'house' (a building) directly yields the meaning 'a building of low-cost/crowded apartments.' The sense is compositional and follows common compound patterns found across languages, so a B1 learner who knows both constituents should be able to infer the MWE's meaning.
Etymology
The term tenement house comes from the old word tenement, which meant 'a holding' or property someone kept and was used for buildings divided into many rented rooms. Imagine a big, old house full of small rented apartments where many families live close together; that's why tenement house now means a crowded, often run-down apartment building.