Bland, tasteless and generic - much like the food served at McDonalds.

Houses tend to be crammed together to maximize profits for developers. Only three people occupy at house with 5 bathrooms and enough garage space to hold a 737. Owners tend to be yuppies or yuppie wannabes.

A giant, ugly immitation-mansion house. No, wait, it doesn't deserve to be called a house. It's fast food in house form. In the 1990s, they began popping up in suburban housing developments, each lawn usually perfectly landscaped. That and the ugly poorly built fairy-tale castles make those developments look too much like Disney Land. The worst part is that they're taking over America, because every new house built, no matter what the style, looks like a McMansion.

Those nausiating large suburban homes that are built from cookie-cutters that seem to pop up everywhere like McDonald's restraunts.

An obscenely large home (usually of at least 3,000 square feet) in suburban America that is almost too big for its use; cheaply built from the inside out; require constant maintanence; stacked so close together in cookie cutter housing developments that you can hear your neighbor on the john; owned and occupied by pretentious, superficial people who care more about materialism and perceived status than actual value, and spend 14 hours six days a week working to pay off the over-inflated mortgage and have no time to spend with each other and experience life for what it is meant to be. The owners literally work themselves to death to pay the mortgage, who also probably struggle to pay off their 20 credit cards and SUV, but don’t have any other time to live a normal life and experience what life is all about. Despite their obscene size, they are occupied by mostly an empty nest couple who think they need like 5 bedrooms and a 3-car garage. They are built by mostly greedy developers who cram as many homes they can for profit.

But things are changing for the McMansion. They are being built less frequently and becoming less necessary as the size of the average American household declines, as the populations ages, and as the economy and housing market go to the dogs. Simply put, McMansions will soon be a thing of the past as people lose their jobs, money, life savings and everything else. In my opinion McMansions represent waste, greed, materialism and comformity, and are also probably one of the reasons the third world and even some ‘rich’ countries hate us.

badly proportioned pastiches of different styles, some are built with attention to detail and materials. But, as the epithet McMansion suggests, they’re just too big—for their lots, for their neighborhoods and for the number of people who actually live in them.

a house that has been super sized

those big generic, nauseating houses that you now see in suburbs. They're usually built by "home builders" and are put close together to increase profit for greedy land developers. They're very cheaply built and it probably took more time to ship in the equipment than it did to actually build the damn thing. On the outside they look like they are just patches of different incompatible architecture styles, and they usually look the same. THe yards are full of generic plants and bushes that the builders probably got from Wal-Mart. The walls are usually made of sheetrock and the backs of the "house" are less showy than their fronts.
Mcmansions have no real physical or historical value since they can barely last for one generation and they all look the same and are a piss stream's length away from the mcmansion next door.
Mcmansions tend to be bought by yuppies and soccer moms who just want to look like they're rich and don't care about actual physical or historical value.
Plus mcmansions contribute to urban sprawl which is bad for the environment since most of the new suburbs where these mcmansions exist were once rich farmland or irreplaceable woodland.

a big, processed house in a suburb or gated community near you; that has approx 3.7 people living in 12 or more rooms, with 3 car garage attached to it. It's exactly like the house about a piss stream's length away from it, because their usually on placed on smallest space or lot.

The term "McMansion" describes any spread out, land eating, mass produced house (AKA single family "home"), most likely made of brick and having a multi-layered roofline/frontage that faces the far away street. It is of the sort most common for the last two decades in the U.S.

They could be (and most often are it seems) only one to one and one half stories, but very rarely exceed 2 to 2 1/2 stories. They range in price from middle income to upper upper income (anything that's over 500K (in most of the interior southeast/midwest) should be designed by an architect anyway.

We can blame our upwardly mobile, disposable national culture, the housing bubble, and to some degree HGTV for perpetuting this phenomenon.

Other space eaters that contribute to suburban/metropolitan sprawl include the ranch house/rambler, the patio home
, and the "florida house."

With any luck, the oil crash will make livestock pens out of these architectural mistakes.