Penthouse

How to spell penthouse

9 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce penthouse

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does penthouse mean?

1. nounA luxury apartment or flat occupying the top floor of a tall building.
2. nounA small structure on the roof of a building that houses lifts, water tanks, or other machinery.

Penthouse in a sentence

• The couple rented a penthouse overlooking the harbour.

• The engineers inspected the lift motors inside the rooftop penthouse.

• The penthouse has a private lift and a rooftop terrace.

• The water tank sits in a penthouse above the top storey.

Where does penthouse come from?

Language of origin: French

Despite its tidy modern look, penthouse has nothing originally to do with the French word for 'slope'. It descends from the Latin appendicium, meaning 'an appendage' or 'something attached', which passed into Old French as apentis, a lean-to or shed built against the side of a larger building. Middle English borrowed this as 'pentis' or 'pentice' in the 1300s, still meaning a sloping roofed structure hung onto a wall. Over time English speakers reshaped the unfamiliar ending by folk etymology, hearing 'house' in the second syllable, so 'pentis' drifted into 'penthouse'. The grand modern meaning, a luxury flat on the top floor, only emerged in the early twentieth century, when rooftop service sheds were converted into desirable apartments. That history explains the spelling trap: the word is genuinely 'pent' plus 'house', not 'pant' or 'pen'.

How the word is built

• pent- (from Old French apentis: a lean-to or attached structure)
• house