Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
in reference to houses, 1845, from semi- + past participle of detach (v.).\n\nThe "Detached House" bears its peculiar characteristic on its front; it stands alone, and nothing more can be said about it; but with the "semi-detached house" there is a subtle mystery, much to be marvelled at. Semi-detached! Have the party-walls between two houses shrunk, or is there a bridge connecting the two, as in Mr. Beckford's house in Landsdown Crescent, Bath? A semi-detached house may be a house with a field on one side and a bone-boiling factory on the other. Semi-detached may mean half-tumbling to pieces. I must inquire into it.
["Houses to Let," in "Household Words," March 20, 1852]
Wiktionary
a. Of a house: joined to another one on one side, having one shared wall. n. Such a house.
Wikipedia
__NOTOC__ Semi-Detached is the fourth major label album by the band Therapy?. Released on 30 March 1998 on A&M Records, it turned out to be their final album on the label. The album was recorded at various stages throughout 1997, including sessions at Chipping Norton Studios in Oxford, Homestead Studio in Randalstown, Moles Studio in Bath and Metropolis Studios in London. It was also the first Therapy? album recorded with Graham Hopkins and Martin McCarrick as full-time members. The album was not released in North America, but charted at number 21 in the UK Albums Chart.
The album was originally released on CD and Cassette, and as a limited edition box set of six 7” singles.
A remastered CD version of the album by Harvey Birrell was included in The Gemil Box, released on November 18, 2013.
A semi-detached house (often abbreviated to semi or semi-D) is a single family dwelling house built as one of a pair that share one common wall. Often, each house's layout is a mirror image of the other.
Semi-detached houses are the most common property type in the UK. They account for 32% of UK housing transactions and 32% of the English housing stock as of 2008. Between 1945 and 1964, 41% of all properties built were semis, but after 1980 this fell to 15%.
Semi-detached housing consists of pairs of houses built side by side.
Semi-detached may also refer to:
- Semi-Detached (album), an album by Therapy?
- "Semi-Detached" (Law & Order: Criminal Intent), an episode of Law & Order: Criminal Intent
- Semi-Detached (play), a play by David Turner
- Semi-Detached, autobiography of Griff Rhys Jones
Semi-Detached is a play written by David Turner. It was premiered at the Belgrade Theatre, Coventry in June 1962 with Leonard Rossiter in the lead role and directed by Tony Richardson. It transferred to London, still directed by Richardson, but with Laurence Olivier (replacing Rossiter), Eileen Atkins, John Thaw, James Bolam (replacing Ian McKellen) and Mona Washbourne. The play reached Broadway in New York for a season in 1963 and a film version All the Way Up (1970), directed by James MacTaggart, starred Richard Briers. The play was revived at the Chichester Festival in 1999.
Usage examples of "semi-detached".
Widahd lingered abovestairs only long enough to to collect the necessaries, then trooped off to the semi-detached bath chamber, returning a good hour later.
Number twelve was a semi-detached cottage with bullnosed corrugated-iron roof and a Victorian fretwork castiron trellis beneath the eaves.
He had almost owned a featureless semi-detached house in the leafier suburbs of South London.
Her home was in the more unfashionable part, a modest semi-detached with a front garden hedged by laurel bushes and planted by her with daffodils, wallflowers and dahlias according to the season.
Parkview, the small private hotel next to the big semi-detached Victorian villa where Karen lived with her parents, was cordoned off with yellow tape as was a considerable stretch of the pavement outside and part of the road itself.
Home was his modest three bedroom semi-detached house on a council estate in Northwich.
It was early morning when Sabat rang the doorbell of Miranda's small, semi-detached house.
Those two were busy routes in and out of the city, but Mayfield Terrace was a quiet oasis, with vast detached and semi-detached houses, most on three and four floors.
About a dozen semi-detached houses faced one another impassively across concrete driveways and rusted iron gates.
It is in a district of semi-detached houses from the town's late Victorian heyday, split into flats popular with single people and young couples.
The minicab drives slowly down a narrow street of pebble-dash semi-detached houses.
Cortina watching the lights go on and off in the bedroom of e semi-detached, and he dines off a paper of fish and chips as he guards the door of a debtor who has gone to earth.
His house was semi-detached, and in the other half of the building lived Dr Neubauer, Reader in Rabbinical Literature.
Only Mrs Scott, now back in her semi-detached house in Burnley, grieved ever for her daughter and could not be comforted, her eyes once more brimming with tears as she struggled to understand what could have happened and -most bitter thought of all - how she herself could surely have helped if only she had known.
By the late 1980s, according to Bingham, you could buy a large, once-proud seafront hotel like the five-storey Grosvenor for the same price as a semi-detached house in London.