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motel

noun · verb

Simple meaning

A type of hotel or lodging establishment, often located near a major highway.

Pronunciation

Say it like this:

mohtehl

Say the bold part a little louder.

US device voice
IPA pronunciation (US)

moʊˈtɛl

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.

Word Review

Definition

Everyday modern meanings first, grouped by part of speech.

noun

  1. also attributive

    A type of hotel or lodging establishment, often located near a major highway, which typically features a series of rooms whose entrances are immediately adjacent to a parking lot to facilitate convenient access to parked automobiles.

  2. A low-cost short-stay hotel, often with hourly rates rather than daily rates, and notorious for permitting illicit sexual activities; love hotel.

  3. A motor hotel

verb

  1. informalintransitive

    To stay in a motel or motels.

Word Aura™

How this word commonly comes across.

Aura for this meaning

This meaning: A type of hotel or lodging establishment, often located near a major highway, which typically features a series of rooms whose entrances are immediately adjacent to a parking lot to facilitate convenient access to parked automobiles.

Used this way, motel 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

Word Aura describes common impressions, not a measurement. Tone changes with sentence, speaker, relationship and situation.

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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.