large apartment buildings that are usually old, crowded, and rented to poor or working-class families.
From Latin tenementum, derived from tenere (to hold). Originally any property held by lease, the word narrowed to mean rental housing, especially the squalid urban apartment buildings of the industrial era.
Tenements were where millions of immigrants to America lived in the 1800s and early 1900s—entire families crammed into tiny rooms with no indoor plumbing—and the buildings became symbols of how cities could exploit poor workers.
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