Townhouse

How to spell townhouse

9 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce townhouse

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does townhouse mean?

1. nounA narrow house, usually of several storeys, that shares one or both side walls with adjoining houses in a row.
2. nounA person's residence in a city, especially one kept in addition to a country home.

Townhouse in a sentence

• They bought a three-storey townhouse near the train station.

• The family kept a country estate in Devon and a townhouse in London.

• The new townhouse shares a wall with the unit next door.

• During the season the duke stayed at his Mayfair townhouse.

Where does townhouse come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is a transparent compound built from two of the oldest words in English, both native Old English. The first element, town, comes from the Old English tun, which originally meant an enclosed piece of ground, a yard, or a fenced settlement, and only later grew to mean a populated place larger than a village. The second element, house, descends from the Old English hus, a dwelling, which has close cousins across the Germanic languages such as the German Haus and the Dutch huis. The pairing arose to distinguish a family's residence in the busy town from its separate house in the countryside, a contrast that mattered greatly to the British landed classes, so historically a townhouse was the elegant urban home of someone who also kept a country seat. The modern, especially North American, sense narrowed to mean a tall, narrow dwelling joined to its neighbours by shared side walls, often in a uniform terraced row. Because both halves are everyday words written exactly as they sound, the only real spelling decision is remembering that townhouse is now usually set as a single closed compound rather than two separate words.

How the word is built

• town (from Old English tun: an enclosure or settlement)
• house (from Old English hus: a dwelling)