ho·tel

[hoh-tel]
noun
1.
a commercial establishment offering lodging to travelers and sometimes to permanent residents, and often having restaurants, meeting rooms, stores, etc., that are available to the general public.
2.
( initial capital letter ) Military. the NATO name for a class of nuclear-powered Soviet ballistic missile submarine armed with up to six single-warhead missiles.
3.
a word used in communications to represent the letter H.

Origin:
1635–45; < French hôtel, Old French hostel hostel

ho·tel·less, adjective

hostel, hotel, motel (see synonym study at the current entry).


1. hostelry, hostel, guesthouse, motel. Hotel, house, inn, tavern refer to establishments for the lodging or entertainment of travelers and others. Hotel is the common word, suggesting a more or less commodious establishment with up-to-date appointments, although this is not necessarily true: the best hotel in the city; a cheap hotel near the docks. The word house is often used in the name of a particular hotel, the connotation being wealth and luxury: the Parker House; the Palmer House. Inn suggests a place of homelike comfort and old-time appearance or ways; it is used for quaint or archaic effect in the names of some public houses and hotels in the U.S.: the Pickwick Inn; the Wayside Inn. A tavern like the English public house is a house where liquor is sold for drinking on the premises; until recently it was archaic or dialectal in the U.S., but has been revived to substitute for saloon, which had unfavorable connotations: Taverns are required to close by two o'clock in the morning. The word has also been used in the sense of inn especially in New England, ever since Colonial days: Wiggins Tavern.
Dictionary.com Unabridged
Based on the Random House Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2013.
Cite This Source Link To hotel
00:10
Hotel is always a great word to know.
So is doohickey. Does it mean:
a chattering or flighty, light-headed person.
a gadget; dingus; thingumbob.
Collins
World English Dictionary
hotel (həʊˈtɛl) [Click for IPA pronunciation guide]
 
n
a commercially run establishment providing lodging and usually meals for guests, and often containing a public bar
 
[C17: from French hôtel, from Old French hostel; see hostel]

Hotel (həʊˈtɛl) [Click for IPA pronunciation guide]
 
n
communications a code word for the letter h

Collins English Dictionary - Complete & Unabridged 10th Edition
2009 © William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd. 1979, 1986 © HarperCollins
Publishers 1998, 2000, 2003, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2009
Cite This Source
Etymonline
Word Origin & History

hotel
1644, "public official residence," from Fr. hôtel, from O.Fr. hostel "a lodging," from M.L. hospitale "inn" (see hostel). Modern sense of "an inn of the better sort" is first recorded 1765. Hotelier is a 1905 borrowing of Fr. hôtelier "hotelkeeper."
Online Etymology Dictionary, © 2010 Douglas Harper
Cite This Source
Example sentences
Also, unlike a hotel, a medical center rarely trains its staff to pay attention
  to how the place looks to guests.
Or maybe it was a hotel room, office or college dorm.
Panelists cited the boom in high-rise hotel construction along the city's beach
  as a cause for concern.
Not surprisingly, the government wants to stimulate hotel building and other
  tourist infrastructure.
Images for hotel
Copyright © 2013 Dictionary.com, LLC. All rights reserved.
  • Please Login or Sign Up to use the Recent Searches feature
FAVORITES
RECENT