TENEMENT

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 Dictionary entry overview: What does tenement mean? 

• TENEMENT (noun)
  The noun TENEMENT has 1 sense:

1. a run-down apartment house barely meeting minimal standards

  Familiarity information: TENEMENT used as a noun is very rare.

 Dictionary entry details 

• TENEMENT (noun)

Sense 1

Meaning:

A run-down apartment house barely meeting minimal standards

Classified under:

Nouns denoting man-made objects

Synonyms:

tenement; tenement house

Hypernyms ("tenement" is a kind of...):

apartment building; apartment house (a building that is divided into apartments)

 Context examples 

Mr. Gregson and I ran him to ground in that big tenement house, and there’s only one door, so he can’t slip us.

(His Last Bow, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

Take possession of your tenement and let me fly from this place.’

(Frankenstein, by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley)

She lived in that gloomy tenement, a place not fit for swine.

(Martin Eden, by Jack London)

“I was not aware that there was any individual, alien to this tenement, in your sanctum.”

(David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens)

The rain beat strongly against the panes, the wind blew tempestuously: "One lies there," I thought, "who will soon be beyond the war of earthly elements. Whither will that spirit—now struggling to quit its material tenement—flit when at length released?"

(Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë)

An hour's complete leisure for such reflections as these, on a dark November day, a small thick rain almost blotting out the very few objects ever to be discerned from the windows, was enough to make the sound of Lady Russell's carriage exceedingly welcome; and yet, though desirous to be gone, she could not quit the Mansion House, or look an adieu to the Cottage, with its black, dripping and comfortless veranda, or even notice through the misty glasses the last humble tenements of the village, without a saddened heart.

(Persuasion, by Jane Austen)

In rapid succession we passed through the fringe of fashionable London, hotel London, theatrical London, literary London, commercial London, and, finally, maritime London, till we came to a riverside city of a hundred thousand souls, where the tenement houses swelter and reek with the outcasts of Europe.

(The Return of Sherlock Holmes, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

He stood in front of a gloomy tenement house.

(Martin Eden, by Jack London)