lightwell.

A shaft, court or open space designed to admit daylight into the interior of a building.

Use it for

Words that belong together

• central lightwell
• narrow lightwell

On the page

The central lightwell illuminated rooms that had no street-facing window.

A narrow lightwell separated the inner rooms from the neighboring wall.

Usage notes

Primary category: architecture / spatial description. Forms: Singular lightwell; plural lightwells. Legacy lexical fields mirror sense 1 only. Use numbered sense fields for all meanings. Established modern English lexical item. No separate regional spelling or grammatical inflection entry. Writing functions: precise built-space description, structural component naming, spatial orientation, interior material description. Disciplines: fiction writing, architectural description, advanced descriptive English. Commonness: moderately common.