semidetached house
- noun
- /ˌsɛmɪdɪˈtætʃ haʊs/
- UK
:
casa adosada
- They recently bought a semidetached house in the suburbs for their growing family.
Examples
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Many British families dream of owning their own semidetached house with a small garden.
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A semidetached house offers more privacy than an apartment but shares a wall with neighbors.
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They live in a semidetached house.
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My friend just bought a semidetached house in London.
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They moved into a charming semidetached house that shared a wall with their neighbor's home.
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The new neighborhood was filled with semidetached houses, each with a small garden in the front.
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After years of renting, they finally bought a semidetached house in a peaceful area of the city.
Synonyms
A house joined to another on one side that shares a wall
Antonyms
How Attached
Surface Forms
Morphology
The meaning is transparently composed: 'semidetached' (sharing one wall with another) modifies 'house', so the phrase denotes a house that shares a wall with another. This modifier+noun composition is a standard, cross-linguistic pattern and would be immediately clear to a B1 learner who knows the constituent words.
Etymology
Semidetached house comes from the simple picture of two homes joined on one side. The part semi means 'half' and detached means 'separate', so each home is only partly separate and shares a wall with the other, which is why it means 'a house joined to another by a shared wall'.