The already-small Victorian terraced homes are often split into several flats. Barnesy 3arnesy. Carito Pita caritorpita. Twitter: ebrudoganxo. Twitter: caitlinadian. View this photo on Instagram. Warner Bros. Our letters are just stuffed through a small slot in our door and left to their own devices. Twitter: Twiterrrerrer. This is one case where Americans use the same term as the British.
When it comes to naming specific types of homes, however, the Americans and the British usually use terms that are quite different. In a few cases, such as ranch house a house on one level, often with a roof that does not slope much , the terms describe types of dwellings that are native to the American continent, thus unknown in Britain.
Some other American terms, such as apartment what the British usually call a flat , may be familiar to speakers of British English, but in Britain they are used to describe different sorts of things, as in the following example: If you visit Hampton Court, you can take a tour of the Royal Apartments. Many of the differences in housing vocabulary are in the words used to describe types of homes. The following is a list of examples in which different words and expressions are used to indicate essentially the same type of house and apartment.
In other situations, however, there may be no exact British equivalent for the American term, as is the case with the following:.
The rooms in a house. The good news here is that American and British English use the same words to describe most of the rooms in a house: bathroom , bedroom , dining room and kitchen.
Note, however, the following differences:. Ask an American and a British person to list the things that can be found in their kitchens and then compare the lists. You will discover a relatively large number of appliances and other items that have different names in American and British English. Here is a list of the most common ones:. Polite houseguests in the U.
Thanks a lot for any native speakers' comment! Click to expand Hermione Golightly Senior Member London. I don't talk about family houses at all and a detached house is simply one that isn't joined to another. In the US, "family house" is not used.
Edit: I forgot "single family house". That is used a lot. Normally the single word "house" implies a detached house, and anything "attached" is given a different name: a duplex a two family house or triplex or fourplex, a condo, an apartment, a row house, a townhouse But people may advertise one of these connected units as a "house", so realtors sometimes have to clarify.
I'm the one that asked the question originally, because I use semi-detached also duplex to mean two houses connected on one side. I'm from Philly and boy do I have the accent , so we use semi here but I hear duplex down the shore.
It was more the markedness of using detached to describe a "just plain house" that I noticed. I mean, for the standard to be "I have a detached house" rather than just "I have a house".
BTW, I live in a rowhouse. I was going to say that in NYC "duplex" is definitely an apartment with two levels, generally a mark of luxury -- there are triplexes, very occasionally. Also, row houses of a certain vintage -- equivalent to London's Victorian terraces -- are "brownstones" even if they are not made of the brown sandstone that made 19th century New York look, Edith Wharton said, as if it had been doused in chocolate syrup. So you could have a brick brownstone. Elsewhere in the US the term "condo" is functionally equivalent to "apartment," at least for those in a newish, large building, as far as I can tell.
This too surprised me, as in New York City there's a binary division between "co-ops" and "condos" based on their financial organization, but I guess the cooperative system doesn't really exist elsewhere. The American distinction between apartments and condos or coops is not made in the UK. In the US, one assumes that any apartment is rented. If you own it, it's called a condo minium.
This is kind of similar to the UK situation in which tenants group together to buy the freehold on their building. And I just don't have the energy to explain freeholds and leaseholds on a Saturday morning! In the UK, flat is used regardless of whether you own it or rent it. Dear lynnequist. Semi-detached is used specifically to describe a dwelling that is divided in the middle, with each dwelling on its own torrens title land no common land.
Just to pick up on a tangential point made early in the post, there's a common misconception, particularly among the British themselves, that Brits are much more committed to owner-occupation than their continental neighbours. In fact, Spain has a higher owner-occupancy rate than the UK does, and I think one or two other European countries have levels similar to the UK's.
The UK may owner-occupation rates that vary between nations, though, for all I know. No time to find a reference right now which is tacky, I know, but it's a beautiful afternoon, and drinking white wine in my garden - ie yard - is much more fun than looking up sources , but I took a course on housing at LSE London School of Economics last year, and was very surprised to learn this fact.
The lecturer, unlike me, had references to back her up, not just a glass of Aussie tipple. I use duplex to refer to a house that was originally single-family and then had been divided into apartments by floor i.
I recently moved to the Philadelphia area, and here there are a lot of houses that sound like the description of semi-detatched, which are called 'twins'. In the London suburbia where I grew up, maisonettes superficially looked like semi-detached houses from the outside. But there were two entrance doors for each "semi", sometimes in the same porch, sometimes one at the front and one at the side. One led to the ground-floor residence, and the other to the first-floor residence.
Just like jack describes a "two-flat". Do you really mean two entrances for each semi? That would give four entrances in total. As is often the case, we've discovered here that there are a lot of regional differences in the terms described here. I did have the feeling that it was more western or midwestern at one point, but it seems to have spread quite a bit, with the NYC meaning still different from the rest.
As for maisonette, our old flat which I think you visited once, Max? Better Half says he might call our old place a maisonette, but being above a shop might disqualify it. He lived in a maisonette growing up, and what he describes is more similar to what Max describes. The top ones had their entrance on a communal balcony that ran around the building. When I stayed in London for a few months nearly two decades ago, I stayed in a terraced house, but I heard it called a "side-by-side".
Have you heard terraced houses called "side-by-sides"? At the time I assumed it was BrE. Realtor "is a service mark used for a real-estate agent affiliated with the National Association of Realtors". Although here, I'm sure that said real-estate agents are quite pleased for there to be confusion. I don't know if you've written about the ugly use of "home" for "house" propagated by the real-estate industry Does this happen in BrE too? Just to add a weird example from the former Soviet Union countries, at least Russia, Ukraine and Lithuania from my own experience.
There some houses are called kottedzhy. They are not quaint stone houses with thatched roofs as they would be in England, but either what would be called town houses in a terrace or individual "villas". The villas are built with fantasy styles straight out of disney, either bought as a plan, or invented straight out of someones foreign travels in Spain, or castles from the Rhine or whatever.
Wish I had joined the mafia. And a much better read about the awful "modern" British house or pastiche Tudor, is Alain de Botton's Architecture of Happiness. What's up with that? I don't think I've ever seen anything like that here in the U. I think in the U. All the cars on one side of the street park facing in one direction, and on the other side they park facing in the other direction.
Unless, of cours, it's a one-way, two-lane street.
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