A tenement is a large old apartment building cut up into many small flats, usually cheap, usually crowded, usually in the poor part of a city. The word carries its conditions with it: when you read tenement you should picture narrow stairs, thin walls, a shared toilet on the landing, several families where an architect planned one. That is why it almost never appears in an advertisement — no landlord calls their building a tenement — but appears constantly in history books, novels, and journalism about poverty. It is strongly tied to particular times and places, and this is the part students miss. In American English it belongs above all to the crowded immigrant buildings of New York in the late 1800s and early 1900s; there is a famous Tenement Museum on the Lower East Side. In Scotland the word is entirely neutral and simply means a stone apartment building of several storeys — a Glasgow lawyer may live in a very nice tenement flat and think nothing of it. So the same word is an accusation in one country and a plain description in another. There is also a narrow legal use, closest to where the word came from: in law, a tenement is any property that is held — land, a building, or even a right attached to land. You will only meet this one in legal documents, but it explains the shape of the word.