Lecture notes for the Brazilian School on Statistical Mechanics, Natal, Brazil, July 2011. The five lectures introduce to the description of entanglement in many-particle systems and review the ground-state entanglement features of standard solvable lattice models. This is done using a thermodynamic formulation in which the eigenvalue spectrum of a certain Hamiltonian determines the entanglement properties. The methods to obtain it are discussed and results, both analytical and numerical, for various cases including time evolution are presented.