Garret
A garret is generally synonymous in modern usage with a habitable attic or small (and possibly dismal or cramped) living space at the top of a house. In the days before lifts (elevators) this was the least prestigious position in a building, and often had sloping ceilings. It entered Middle English via Old French with a military connotation of a watchtower or something akin to a garrison, in other words a place for guards or soldiers to be quartered in a house. Like garrison it comes from an Old French word garir of ultimately Germanic origin meaning to provide or defend.
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Famous quotes containing the word garret:
“If I were confined to a corner of a garret all my days, like a spider, the world would be just as large to me while I had my thoughts about me.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Each truth that a writer acquires is a lantern, which he turns full on what facts and thoughts lay already in his mind, and behold, all the mats and rubbish which had littered his garret become precious. Every trivial fact in his private biography becomes an illustration of this new principle, revisits the day, and delights all men by its piquancy and new charm.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“That garret of the earth—that knuckle-end of England—that land of Calvin, oat-cakes, and sulphur.”
—Sydney Smith (1771–1845)