basement: Meaning and Definition of

base•ment

Pronunciation: (bās'munt), [key]
— n.
  1. a story of a building, partly or wholly underground.
  2. (in classical and Renaissance architecture) the portion of a building beneath the principal story, treated as a single compositional unit.
  3. the lowermost portion of a structure.
  4. the substructure of a columnar or arched construction.
Random House Unabridged Dictionary, Copyright © 1997, by Random House, Inc., on Infoplease.
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