Apartment

How to spell apartment

9 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce apartment

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does apartment mean?

1. nounA self-contained set of rooms forming a residence, usually on one floor within a larger building.

Apartment in a sentence

• They rented a small apartment near the train station.

• The building has twelve units, and her apartment is on the top floor.

Where does apartment come from?

Language of origin: French

The word arrived in English in the late 1600s from the French appartement, which itself came from the Italian appartamento. The Italian noun was built on the verb appartare, meaning 'to separate' or 'to set apart', from the phrase a parte, literally 'to the side'. The underlying root is the Latin pars, meaning 'a part' or 'portion', which gives us a whole family of English words including 'part', 'partition', and 'depart'. An apartment was therefore originally a set of rooms 'set apart' for one occupant within a larger building, and that sense of a separated, self-contained unit survives in the modern meaning. A useful spelling note is that English kept only a single 'p' here, even though the French and Italian forms doubled it; remembering the plain 'part' inside the word helps fix the one-p, one-t pattern.

How the word is built

• a- (to)
• part (separate, set apart)
• -ment (noun suffix denoting result or state)