Basement

For other uses, see Basement (disambiguation).
Not to be confused with Crawl space.
An unfinished basement used for storage and exercise
Chillon Castle (Château de Chillon) basement
A former Stasi basement hallway
Cellars are often used in pubs to keep beer barrels connected to the bar at ground level.

A basement or cellar is one or more floors of a building that are completely or partly below the ground floor.[1] Especially in residential buildings, it often is used as a utility space for a building, where such items as the furnace, water heater, breaker panel or fuse box, car park, and air-conditioning system are located; so also are amenities such as the electrical system and cable television distribution point. In cities with high property prices, such as London, basements are often fitted out to a high standard and used as living space.

In British English, the word basement is usually used for underground floors of, for example, department stores. The word is usually used with buildings when the space below the ground floor is habitable and with (usually) its own access. The word cellar applies to the whole underground level or to any large underground room. A subcellar or subbasement is a level that lies below the basement or cellar.[2]

  1. ^ "Basement - FEMA.gov". www.fema.gov.
  2. ^ Subcellar – definition of Subcellar by the Free Online Dictionary, Thesaurus and Encyclopedia.