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A launderette is a shop full of washing machines and dryers that you use yourself, paying with coins or a card. You bring your dirty clothes, put them in, wait, and take them home clean. Nobody washes them for you — that is the difference from a laundry or a dry cleaner's, where you hand the clothes over and come back later. The word is British. Americans say laundromat, and that word is now understood almost everywhere, including by many British speakers. In Britain you will also see the spelling launderette and the older form laundrette; both are fine. It is an ordinary, everyday word, slightly old-fashioned in feeling because fewer people need them now, and it often carries a whole atmosphere in British writing and film — waiting on a plastic chair, watching the machine go round, strangers not talking.
自助洗衣店（英式說法；美式是 laundromat，台灣講「自助洗衣店」）
組成launder + -ette. Launder means to wash clothes; -ette is a small-sized or feminine ending borrowed from French, as in kitchenette. It began as a brand name — Launderette, a trademark of the Bendix company in the 1940s — and then became the ordinary word for the thing, the way people say hoover for vacuum cleaner.
同家族的字
- laundrysame launder root: the clothes, or the place they are washed
- kitchenettesame French -ette ending: a small kitchen
- launderthe verb it is built on, from Latin lavare, 'to wash'
原始詞典資料2 筆記錄
以下是外部詞典記錄的用法，原文照列，我們還沒有寫成教學內容。上面的說明才是我們自己寫的；有些用法可能上面已經講過了。
launderettenoun/lɔːnˈdɹɛt/
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A place that has facilities for washing and drying clothes that the public may pay to use.
- 2
A money laundering operation.
- The distinction is by no means watertight as any 'money launderette' may become a money launderer – and hence be guilty of a money laundering offence – the moment it knowingly engages in a money laundering operation.
- From drug money to terrorist finance: the launderette's many different washing cycles
資料來源：英文維基詞典 English Wiktionary（CC BY-SA 4.0）。 原文照列，未經改寫。