furniture
Americannoun
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the movable articles, as tables, chairs, desks or cabinets, required for use or ornament in a house, office, or the like.
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fittings, apparatus, or necessary accessories for something.
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equipment for streets and other public areas, as lighting standards, signs, benches, or litter bins.
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Also called bearer. Also called dead metal. Printing. pieces of wood or metal, less than type high, set in and about pages of type to fill them out and hold the type in place in a chase.
noun
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the movable, generally functional, articles that equip a room, house, etc
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the equipment necessary for a ship, factory, etc
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printing lengths of wood, plastic, or metal, used in assembling formes to create the blank areas and to surround the type
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the wooden parts of a rifle
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obsolete the full armour, trappings, etc, for a man and horse
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the attitudes or characteristics that are typical of a person or thing
the furniture of the murderer's mind
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informal someone or something that is so long established in an environment as to be accepted as an integral part of it
he has been here so long that he is part of the furniture
Other Word Forms
- furnitureless adjective
Etymology
Origin of furniture
1520–30; < French fourniture, derivative of fournir to furnish
Explanation
The chairs, tables, sofas, and beds in your house are furniture. Your furniture gives you somewhere to sit, store your books, and a comfortable place to sleep at night. Furniture can be defined as the things in your house that you can move around — you can rearrange the furniture in your living room to make room for a piano, for example. Humans have been building and using some form of furniture for thousands of years. Furniture comes from the Middle French fourniture, "a supply," or "an act of furnishing."
Vocabulary lists containing furniture
Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
"We can't put our prices up in accordance with how much more it's costing to do it, because we're then not doing what we're supposed to do, which is give people affordable furniture," he added.
From BBC • Apr. 22, 2026
"There is nothing left, no doors, no furniture," the 51-year-old woman said, stepping over the rubble of her charred living room and kitchen.
From Barron's • Apr. 21, 2026
By contrast, reshoring of apparel and furniture is a fight against economic gravity, namely the massive labor cost advantage in other countries.
From The Wall Street Journal • Apr. 18, 2026
Much of the discarded furniture and other goods left on the streets ends up being used to build homeless encampments, Phillips said.
From Los Angeles Times • Apr. 18, 2026
I explain to her about the second floor full of stuff, about how Babs wants to expand the tea shop, and about some of the furniture I’m hoping to fix.
From "The Wrong Way Home" by Kate O’Shaughnessy
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
