Meaning & use

tenement

noun·Academic

A large building, especially in a poor urban area, divided into apartments that are often small and run-down.

See it in a sentence

The family of six shared two rooms in a crowded tenement on the Lower East Side.

City officials condemned the old tenement after inspectors found serious structural damage.

A note on using this word

Strongly associated with crowded, low-income urban housing of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Words with a similar meaning

apartment building

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