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motel

nounverbcommon in dialogue

  • United States//moʊˈtɛl//

A type of hotel or lodging establishment, often located near a major highway, which typically features a series of rooms whose entrances are immediately adjacent to a parking lot to facilitate convenient access to parked automobiles.

noun

  1. 1

    A type of hotel or lodging establishment, often located near a major highway, which typically features a series of rooms whose entrances are immediately adjacent to a parking lot to facilitate convenient access to parked automobiles.

  2. 2

    A low-cost short-stay hotel, often with hourly rates rather than daily rates, and notorious for permitting illicit sexual activities; a love hotel.

Etymology

Etymology tree Proto-Indo-European *m(y)ewh₁- Proto-Indo-European *-yeti Proto-Indo-European *-éyeti Proto-Indo-European *m(y)owh₁éyeti Proto-Italic *moweō Latin moveō Proto-Indo-European *-tōr Proto-Italic *-tōr Latin -tor Latin mōtorder. Middle English motour English motor Proto-Indo-European *gʰóstis Proto-Indo-European *pótis Proto-Indo-European *gʰóstipotis Proto-Italic *hostipotis Latin hospes Proto-Indo-European *h₂el- Proto-Indo-European *-is Proto-Indo-European *h₂élisder.? Proto-Italic *-ālis Latin -ālis Latin hospitālis Old French ostel Middle French hostel French hôtelbor. English hotel blend English motel Blend of motor + hotel, from the original Motel Inn of San Luis Obispo in California, United States, established in 1925 by Arthur Heineman (1878–1974).

verb

  1. 1

    informalTo stay in a motel or motels.

Forms

plural
motels
past tense
motelled
past participle
motelled
present participle
motelling
third person singular
motels
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).