dwelling

What it means

1. A house or place in which a person lives; a habitation, a home.

   The old house served as a dwelling for Albert.

   4 more examples

   For Philip's dwelling fronted on the street, / The latest house to landward; but behind, / With one small gate that open'd on the waste, / Flourish'd a little garden square and wall'd; [...]

   1864, Alfred Tennyson, “Enoch Arden”, in Enoch Arden, &c., London: Edward Moxon & Co., […], →OCLC, page 40

   The place had the empty and musty feel and smell usual to a dwelling no longer inhabited. Everywhere was a thick litter of discarded and ragged garments, old sea-boots, leaky oilskins -- all the worthless forecastle dunnage of a long voyage.

   1904, Jack London, chapter 32, in The Sea-Wolf (Macmillan’s Standard Library), New York, N.Y.: Grosset & Dunlap, →OCLC

   He turned back to the scene before him and the enormous new block of council dwellings. The design was some way after Corbusier but the block was built up on plinths and resembled an Atlantic liner swimming diagonally across the site.

   1963, Margery Allingham, “Foreword: The Turk Street Mile”, in The China Governess: A Mystery, London: Chatto & Windus, →OCLC, page 9

   I was so thrilled to see a live bedbug, I showed it off to every graduate student I ran into that day: Cimex lectularius[,] a small, flat, wingless, brown ectoparasite that hides in cracks and crevices in human dwellings and emerges under cover of darkness to feast on human blood.

   2010 August 7, May Berenbaum, “This Bedbug’s Life”, in The New York Times

   Synonyms: abode, crib, digs, domicile, flop, habitation, home, homestead

In a sentence

The old house served as a dwelling for Albert.

Where it comes from

1. Middle Englishdwellynge
2. Englishdwelling

From Middle English dwellynge, dwellyng (“delay, continuance, abode”), equivalent to dwell + -ing. More at dwell.