Other forms: compartments
A compartment is one closed-off section inside a bigger space. On an older train it is the small room of six seats with a sliding door onto the corridor, a luggage rack overhead and everybody's knees nearly touching.
Away from railways, a compartment is any divided-off part of a container or a vehicle: the glove compartment where the car documents live, the freezer compartment at the top of the fridge, a tackle box with a compartment for each size of hook. Ships are built with watertight compartments so that one hole does not sink the whole vessel. The verb grown from it is compartmentalise — keeping the parts of your life in separate boxes so they never touch, which is what people say about the colleague who never once mentions home.
1nounrailAn enclosed section of seats in a railway carriage, with its own door.
“We had a compartment to ourselves as far as Vienna.”
synonyms: carriage section
2nounseparateA separate section inside a container, a piece of furniture or a vehicle.
“The passports were in the glove compartment.”
compartment is a divided section of a space.
Compartment turns up in English in 1564, from Middle French compartiment and Italian compartimento, and behind those Latin compartior, to divide or share with: com- plus partior, to apportion or divide. A compartment is a share of a space, walled off from the rest.
Italian
compartimento
Middle French
compartiment
English, today
compartment
Built from
From Middle French compartiment, from Italian compartimento. First attested 1564, from Middle French compartiment, from Italian compartimento, from Latin compartior (“to divide with, to share with”), from com- + partior (“to apportion, to divide, to share”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA
Practised in A Man Called Ove, Railways
First appears in chapter 12 of A Man Called Ove.
Practise this word