walk-up apartment
1
3.9
- noun
- /ˈwɔkˌʌp əˈpɑrtmənt/
:
apartamento sin ascensor
- Living in some walk-up apartment in a despised neighborhood of the city, or perhaps she lived in one of the best sections, on Beacon Hill: a whole hill of defiant, lustful women in Chanel suits and Italian shoes.
- walk-up apartment building
- live in a walk-up apartment
Examples
-
When I lived in a small fifth-floor walk-up apartment in New York, I was new to fine cooking.
-
Admittedly, when you live in a tiny walk-up apartment, you have your work cut out for you, but it is possible.
Blog text (22) -
This brought him into the realm of Riley Fitzsimmons, who has lived on the corner of Bethune and Washington since 1968, when his family moved into a four-bedroom walk-up apartment.
Blog text (18) -
That left Alison's mother and the two girls having to move into a cramped walk-up apartment, while the mother returned to all those labs and all those dragging hours of an eventual internship in a lying-in hospital that paid poorly.
Fiction book (1993) -
They live with their two children in a walk-up apartment on the outskirts of New Delhi.
-
Home is a two-bedroom walk-up apartment, which her husband and two children share with another family.
Synonyms
∞
1.0
A set of rooms on one floor for one person or family in a building
3
5.6
A building with several floors and no elevator where you must use stairs
Antonyms
How High
Surface Forms
Morphology
walk-up + apartment
The phrase is compositionally transparent: 'walk' + 'up' conveys the idea of going upstairs and combined with 'apartment' clearly indicates a unit reached by walking up stairs (i.e. no elevator). This is a directly inferable, motivated compound used in everyday speech, so a B1 learner who knows the constituents can readily deduce the meaning.
Etymology
The phrase walk-up apartment comes from the simple image of having to walk up stairs to reach your home because the building has no elevator. That's why it means 'an apartment in a building without an elevator'.