Caretaker

How to spell caretaker

9 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce caretaker

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does caretaker mean?

1. nounA person employed to look after a building or property, handling cleaning, repairs, and security.
2. nounA person who looks after someone who cannot fully look after themselves, such as a relative or patient.
3. adjectiveHolding a position or running an organisation only temporarily until a permanent replacement takes over.

Caretaker in a sentence

• noun

  The caretaker unlocked the school gates each morning before classes began.

• noun

  She became the main caretaker for her elderly father after his stroke.

• adjective

  A caretaker government ran the country for six weeks until the election results were confirmed.

• noun

  Our block of flats hired a new caretaker to handle the heating and the rubbish.

• noun

  The agency sent a trained caretaker to help him bathe and prepare meals.

• adjective

  The club appointed a caretaker manager while the board searched for a permanent coach.

Where does caretaker come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is a transparent English compound, joining 'care' and 'taker', that came together in the early 1800s to name someone who takes charge of looking after a thing or a place. The 'care' half descends from the Old English noun caru or cearu, which originally meant grief, anxiety, or burden of the mind rather than tender attention; that older heavy sense still surfaces in phrases like 'without a care in the world'. The 'taker' half is built on the verb 'take', which English absorbed from the Old Norse taka, meaning to grasp or seize, brought over by Norse settlers. Put together, a caretaker is literally one who takes on the care, the responsibility, of something. The same logic produced the later American near-synonym 'caregiver', which simply swaps in 'give'. Because the parts are familiar everyday words, the spelling is regular and the only real choice is whether to write it as one word, which is now standard.

How the word is built

• care (from Old English caru: worry, concern, looking after)
• take (from Old Norse taka: to grasp, take)
• -er (agent suffix: one who does)