The same holds true for a three-apartment building. And “if you’re in a multi-story residence with no one above or below your unit, but there are residences on both sides, it’s called a ‘ townhouse.’ If there are just two residences in the same building, it’s a ‘ duplex.’”Īnd yet, in Chicago, a two-story building with a legal apartment on each floor is known as a “two-flat” and not a duplex. Someone else wrote that apartments are often, but not always, a single story. If the residences are owned, they’re called condos.” and Western Canada is for a “rented residence in a multi-unit building.

One Stack Exchange respondent wrote that the term “apartment” in the U.S. flat: American styleĭig a little deeper and you’ll find more layers to these words, at least according to the online discussion groups. There’s no answer as to why that didn’t happen. is made of immigrants from all over the world, and there were plenty of people with German backgrounds during the nation’s founding, one would think “flat” might have made its mark. These two just can’t escape each other, much like the Americans and Brits. In North America, an apartment refers to any suite of rooms for sleeping, eating and bathing.įlat derives from the Old English (via Proto-Germanic) “ flett,” “a dwelling, hall, floor, ground.” In the 1800s, a flat meant the floor or part of a floor set up as an apartment. Appartamento derives from the verb “appartere,” which means to separate. The word “apartment” comes from the Italian word “ appartamento,” used to describe a suite of rooms located in a larger building. The differences between an apartment and a flat

So, synonyms, right? Au contraire (to throw some French into the mix), there’s more going on than meets the linguistic eye. call their place an apartment and those in the United Kingdom call their place a flat. Go back in time to the Internet Stone Age, the early 2000s, and people from Stack Exchange to Reddit fell on their swords over something that seems pretty simple to answer. a flat? Really, this is something that has been plaguing people. Questions for the ages: Where do we come from? Why are we here? What’s the difference between an apartment vs.

Flat io rest