attic
noun · adjective
Simple meaning
Floor made up of open space at the top of a house just below roof.
Pronunciation
Say it like this:
atikSay the bold part a little louder.
IPA pronunciation (US)
ˈætɪk
This word is pronounced essentially the same in American and British English, so one transcription covers both.
IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) is a standard way of writing speech sounds.
Definition
Everyday modern meanings first, grouped by part of speech.
noun
Floor consisting of open space at the top of a house just below roof; often used for storage
The space, often unfinished and with sloped walls, directly below the roof in the uppermost part of a house or other building, generally used for storage or habitation.
slang
A person's head or brain.
The dialect of Ancient Greek spoken and written in Attica and Athens and Ionia
The dialect of Ancient Greek used in Attica, the region surrounding Athens, from 500 to 300 B.C.E., closely related to Ionic Greek and a main contributor to Koine. The language of Thucydides, Plato, Aeschylus, Xenophon, etc.
adjective
figurative
Marked by the qualities traditionally considered characteristic of the ancient Athenians: classical, refined.
Word at a Glance
- Difficulty
- B2 · Upper Intermediate (estimated)
- Frequency
- Moderately Common
- Formality
- Technical
Word Aura™
How this word commonly comes across.
Aura for this meaning
This meaning: Floor consisting of open space at the top of a house just below roof; often used for storage
Used this way, attic is a reasonably familiar word that usually carries little praise or criticism of its own. It usually sounds natural in a wide range of settings.
- Emotional tone
- Neutral
- Formality
- Neutral
- Intensity
- Not strongly marked
- How common
- Moderately common
- Connotation
- Matter-of-fact
- Usage feel
- Neutral and straightforward
Nearby words
- noggin , rarer, so it draws attention
Word Aura describes common impressions, not a measurement. Tone changes with sentence, speaker, relationship and situation.
More ways to use attic
- “We stored old holiday decorations and childhood toys in the dusty attic.”
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Common Patterns and Combinations
How this word naturally appears with others.
Word Family
Related forms, grouped by how they connect.
Compound terms
Established multiword terms.
A fan that blows heated air out of the attic of a building.
Related Words
Connected to the same idea, not synonyms.
More about this wordSynonyms, forms, origin
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Dictionary data from Wiktionary via the Free Dictionary API. Simple meanings, combinations and word intelligence are built from verified reference data, no AI is used to load this page.