I hardly ever hear anyone say “cellar” anymore. The only time I do is when they’re talking about a wine cellar. Everyone says “basement” now. “Cellar” seems like it’s an old-fashioned word.
Am I right? Do you or does anyone you know still say “cellar?”
To me, “cellar” means something different than “basement.” When I think of a cellar, I think of a storage space under a house. At most, it has shelves. It’s not meant to be a living space.
A basement, on the other hand, can be anything from a cellar to a fully-furnished finished living area.
I’ll echo Athena. It seems a matter of connotation, rather than denotation, but ‘cellar’ to me, suggests unfinished walls. You could hang out in a basement. You’d shelter from a tornado in a cellar, or store roots there.
I tend to also think of them as different things. A basement is more or less finished–not that it has to be heated or plastered or anything, but it has walls, a floor, glass in the windows, etc. A cellar, in my mind, is a more privative affair, just a hole in the ground with a dirt floor and either no windows or unglazed ones. A basement is usually poured concrete, a cellar is built of large granite slabs where visible and loose miscellaneous stones where not. Cellars may not necessarily be under a house (they might be under a barn or a shed or there might not be anything on top of them), but basements always are.
See, I think of a basement being accessed from a stairwell within the house, while a cellar can only be accessed from an outside source (like those mostly-horizontal outside doors you see on old farmhouses).
If it can be accessed from both, it is still a basement.
It might be a regional thing. Where I live, in southern Ontario, essentially all detached houses that aren’t trailers have basements - as described above, an entire floor of the house, mostly below ground, that can be finished and furnished into a living space.
A “cellar” sounds to me like something that CAN’T be turned into a rec room or a home office.
But people used to call the finished areas a cellar. We would go down in the cellar in our house when I was growing up, and it was finished and had an door to the outside as well as stairs inside.
The change was primarily due to real estate marketing. “Basement” sounds better than “cellar,” just as “home” sounds better than “house.”
Has the terminology changed in your area, or did you grow up elsewhere? It might just be like the “hoagie/sub/grinder/hero” thing where various places have completely different words to describe the same thing.
The word “cellar” will have a long shelf life in the sports world, where you have the delightfully rhyming term “cellar dweller” to describe lousy teams.
I think this might have been unique to where you were at. Can’t say I’ve ever heard of anyone calling a finished basement a cellar in all my life. There was a time when the entire concept of a finished or livable basement was unheard of, cellar was probably the common term then.
I’m working on having both. My root cellar will have a cool area for crops such as potatoes, squash, and onions. My basement area will have an area for an upright freezer and a washer and dryer. I can dream.
I want “basement placement” to emerge.
In this area a basement is made of block or poured cement and you can stand up in it. Any house made since the 60’s has a basement if not built on piles.
A cellar is the old stone walled ones often with a dirt floor that you can stand up in. You have to wonder if the stairs will fall down as you use them. You are told not to touch a wall because the stones are loose.
My grandparents have both! You have to go through the “basement” to get to the “cellar,” though. But there is definitely a room off to the side that appears to have been dug out by hand and it’s used to store plants, produce and canned goods. When I am trying to score some of grandma’s canned cherries, I say “do you have any cherries in the cellar?” but when I refer to their washing machine I say it’s in the basement.
Ditto to ZipperJJ. My grandparents had both a cellar and a basement; they made cheese and it aged in the cheese cellar. And the basement was for laundry. My aunt had a cellar for canned goods and no basement.
Same here. In Texas, a cellar was where we stored food, mostly the home grown or home canned variety. I’m sure many big cellars have been converted into normal rooms - but then they aren’t “cellars” anymore.
There’s an on-line mape which shows the distribution of basement vs. cellar, but I can’t find it at the moment.
“Wine basement” just doesn’t have the same ring to it.
It’s the Harvard Dialect Survey, but the maps which show occurrences (by self-reporting) with colored dots on a map of the U.S., are no long available on-line, it seems.
This is how I think of them too. My family used to have a farmhouse and we had a “cellar” not a “basement”. To get access to the cellar, you had to go outside and behind the house to the cellar doors that looked like this.
