Greenhouse

How to spell greenhouse

10 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce greenhouse

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does greenhouse mean?

1. nounA building with glass walls and roof used for growing plants in a controlled, warm climate.
2. nounUsed attributively in climate science to describe the trapping of heat in the atmosphere, as in greenhouse effect or greenhouse gas.

Greenhouse in a sentence

• She raised tomato seedlings in the greenhouse before planting them outside.

• The report measured how much greenhouse gas each factory released each year.

• The garden centre sold a small aluminium greenhouse for the back patio.

• Carbon dioxide is the most discussed greenhouse gas in policy debates.

Where does greenhouse come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is a transparent English compound, joining the native words 'green' and 'house', both of which descend from Old English: 'grene' described the colour of fresh growing plants and shared a root with the verb 'grow', while 'hus' simply meant a dwelling or building. The compound appears in the early 1700s to name a glass structure built to keep tender plants warm and growing through the cold months, so the 'green' literally refers to the living plants kept inside. Earlier such buildings were sometimes called 'conservatories' or 'stoves', but 'greenhouse' won out as the everyday word. In the twentieth century the term took on a new scientific life in 'greenhouse effect' and 'greenhouse gas', borrowing the image of glass trapping heat to describe how the atmosphere retains warmth. Because both halves are common words spelled exactly as they sound, the only real spelling decision is remembering it is written as one solid word rather than two.

How the word is built

• green (the colour, here describing growing plants)
• house (a structure/building)