Cottage

How to spell cottage

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce cottage

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does cottage mean?

1. nounA small, usually old or simple house, especially one in the countryside.

Cottage in a sentence

• They spent the weekend at a rented cottage near the coast.

• The retired couple bought a stone cottage with a thatched roof.

Where does cottage come from?

Language of origin: French

Cottage comes into English from the Anglo-Norman and Old French word 'cotage', which named a humble dwelling and the small plot of land that went with it. The first element traces back to the native Old English 'cot', meaning a hut, shed, or modest house, a word of Germanic stock related to 'cote' as in 'dovecote' (a shelter for pigeons). To that root was attached the suffix '-age', which English absorbed through French from the Latin '-aticum', a common ending used to form nouns for a collective thing or a related state. In medieval law a 'cotage' specifically meant the dwelling of a cottar, a peasant who held a small house with little or no farmland attached. Over time the legal sense faded and the word softened into the now familiar picture of a small, cosy country house, and later the holiday home so beloved in Britain, Canada, and beyond. The doubled 't' is the spelling trap worth noting, since the single short vowel of 'cot' is preserved by writing two t's before the '-age'.

How the word is built

• cot (small dwelling, hut)
• -age (noun suffix denoting a collective or related thing)