Attic

How to spell attic

5 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce attic

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does attic mean?

1. nounThe space or room inside the roof of a house, directly below the slope of the roof and above the main living floors.

Attic in a sentence

• They stored the old photo albums in the attic above the bedrooms.

• A leak in the roof left a damp patch across the attic floor.

Where does attic come from?

Language of origin: Greek

This homely word has a surprisingly grand and classical origin. It comes from the Greek Attikos, meaning 'of Attica', the region surrounding Athens, which passed into Latin as Atticus and then into French as attique. In classical architecture, an 'Attic order' or 'Attic storey' was a low decorative section, often a small wall or row of pilasters, placed above the main cornice of a building in the refined Athenian style. English borrowed the term in the 1600s, and through the 1700s the 'attic storey' came to mean the cramped upper level just under the roof. Over time people dropped 'storey' and kept 'attic' as the name for that top space itself, so a word that once described elegant Athenian taste now usually means the dusty room where boxes are stored. The single t in the first syllable and the double t in the middle echo the Latin Atticus, which is worth remembering since the spelling looks deceptively simple.

How the word is built

• Attic- (from Attica, the region around Athens)
• -ic (adjective suffix), later a noun