Other forms: cellars
A cellar is the room under a house, below ground, cool and dark and a bit damp. Stone steps down, one bare bulb, boxes and bottles and the boiler ticking in the corner.
A wine cellar is the famous kind, and to cellar a wine is to lay it down for years before opening it. Americans reach for basement more, especially for a room finished well enough to live in, while a cellar stays a storeroom. A salt cellar is the small pot on the table: same spelling, no stairs involved. Cellars hold coal, apples, beer barrels, bicycles and everything nobody can bring themselves to throw away.
1nounbasementAn underground room below a house, used for storage.
“The boiler is down in the cellar with the bicycles.”
2nouncellarA stock of wine, or the room kept for storing it.
“His cellar runs to three hundred bottles.”
3verbstoreTo store wine for years before drinking it.
“This one is worth cellaring for a decade.”
Too few real examples of this word to estimate which sense is commonest.
cellar is a room.
Also accepted in games: basement
Cellar comes through Middle English celer and Anglo-Norman celer from Latin cellarium, and behind that Latin cella, the same small room that stands behind cell. The Proto-Indo-European root is *kel-. Nothing in the word says wine, or stairs, or damp; it says only a small closed room for keeping things in.
Proto-Indo-European
*ḱel-
Latin
cellārium
Old French
celier
Anglo-Norman
celer
Middle English
celer
English, today
cellar
From Middle English celer, seler, from Anglo-Norman celer, Old French celier (modern cellier), from Latin cellārium, from Latin cella. a doublet of cellarium.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA