What is a "duplex" to you? Here in the midwest it means 2 separate residences in 1 building. However, my daughter is moving to a new apartment which has the living area downstairs and the bedrooms upstairs; her friends from the east coast said, "Oh, a 'duplex'." To us it's a 2-story apartment.

Another interesting term is "estate." I have been reading about England lately and found that they call multi-unit housing "estates." Here an estate is for the rich: big, beautiful, and expensive! In Chicago, for example, the "estates" are on Lake Michigan.

There's a cookie maker that calls its Oreo clone a duplex. Does that help you any?

Around here dwellings with the bedrooms upstairs are all jammed into rows, and they call them either rowhouses or townhouses. I guess they call them that because there's nearly no land around them, so it makes it slightly less expensive t'own houses that way. When they're called rowhouses, it's because you're so close to your neighbours that you can hear them fighting.

Like Asa, I've always thought of a duplex as a house with two separate living units, usually side by side, but occasionally with one downstairs unit and one upstairs unit. An apartment with two floors is called a townhouse. But OneLook gives as its first definition, "noun: an apartment having rooms on two floors that are connected by a staircase", and its second definition, "noun: a house with two units sharing a common wall". It doesn't say anything about cookies. That must be an oversight.

Tinman

It doesn't say anything about cookies. That must be an oversight.
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Don't feel bad, Tinman! I just tried Googling Keebler Duplex cookies and got a whole pile of unrelated crap, without any mention of the Keebler Cookie Company! They talked about Krap, er, Kraft Foods, which is another name for Nabisco, which is another name for our friendly drug pushers, R. J. Reynolds Tobacco, but NO Keebler! Grumble, gripe, kvetch, bitch....

We don't use "duplex" at all over here. Two houses side-by-side built into one are called "semi-detached" - a house standing on its own is "detached". One built above another on a different floor (but with a separate front door) is a "maisonette".

Nowadays "estates" usually refer to developments of low-cost housing built by local councils. In the past, of course, the word meant the land owned by the local lord which in some cases comprised half the county.

quote:

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Originally posted by arnie:
We don't use "duplex" at all over here. Two houses side-by-side built into one are called "semi-detached" - a house standing on its own is "detached". One built above another on a different floor (but with a separate front door) is a "maisonette".

Nowadays "estates" usually refer to developments of low-cost housing built by local councils. In the past, of course, the word meant the land owned by the local lord which in some cases comprised half the county.

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Not to forget

"flat" - a single unit usually consisting of just a couple of rooms in a larger building which is broken down into several such flats. Similar to the US apartment.

"block of flats" - a multi-storey building divided into flats. Not much in vogue nowadays but much loved by architects in the sixties who didn't realise what hell holes they would rapidly become.

"terraced house" - again not a modern style, one of a long row of hoses all joined together.

Incidentally "estate" has come over the years to carry negative connotations, not nice places to live. Strangely I live on what was called a "housing estate" when my family mived here in the early sixties and it's a perfectly decent place although no-one uses the word "estate" any more.

Glaubt es mir - das Geheimnis, um die größte Fruchtbarkeit und den größten Genuß vom Dasein einzuernten, heisst: gefährlich leben.
- Friedrich Nietzsche

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I've heard "flat" used in the eastern part of the USA, and it's understood here in the western USA, but not used that I know of.

How did you respond to that English girl who was criticizing your apartment?

I knocked her flat.